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Ignore my screams of pain because in contemporary  Society mortals scream not in pain but for love,  And what are mortals if not for a loveless world? so rip My lungs out, but hold my corpse because Eurydice  Had everything she ever asked for when Orpheus looked Back if only to check whether she was okay as they  Walked to the second chance they never got. Sometimes I look at my dog, and I want to cry Because what are lives if not temporary, What is a mortal if not hereditary? because I am My mother’s heart and her melatonin habits but my Father’s rage and his overtly fast metabolism so I grind my teeth in my sleep so that my nose doesn’t Grow any longer with the lies it is taught to tell Because what am I if not fake? I talk pretty so they don’t see the rapacious desires That lie under my bones like carnal nothings, and  Sometimes late at night I look at myself in the Mirror and see myself through Aphrodite’s eyes As she looked at Psyche and wonder where is my Eros? But what is a mortal if not a heart beating For no one? so hold my hand as I go to church. Jiwon Huh is a junior attending Korea International School. She is an avid poet and attended the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference, as well as the online Kenyon Young Writers’ Workshop. She has been previously published in Johns Hopkins CTY Lexophilia and Apotheca Journal.

Why Sex Therapists Hate The Simpsons                                                                         You’d think being a sex therapist would be stimulating. (Pun intended. I long to be a writer.) But it’s soooo boring. Same old, same old. Infidelity. Fear of sexual intimacy—yes, ex-husband #1, that’s you with your computer and spreadsheets after making love—difficulties achieving orgasm, mismatched libidos; now you’re up, ex-husband # 2. As a Scorpio you should have been in heat 24/7 but noooo by our second year of marriage it was excuse after excuse, but you showed your Scorpio colors when you hired that detective to spy on me and my horse ranch lover which I discovered only because the detective got gouged on the barbed wire fence and his howls disturbed us in our nest of fresh laundry. WAY more interesting than anything that goes on in my office, where another wife whines about her husband’s porn addiction. You’d think I’d hear mesmerizing stories from clients discussing compulsive sexual behaviors, but THEY’RE ALL SO PREDICTABLE!!!  Not like you, ex-husband # 3; when you taught The Tempest,  we had to role play every combination of characters fucking: Caliban and Ariel, Stephano and Trinculo, Prospero and Antonio. And when you were obsessed with The Simpsons , you could only come when I was Marge Simpson wearing that godawful blue wig moaning, “Homer, Homer.” And omg, that time you decided my orgasms should peak at 11 seconds. If I was still climaxing, you’d shout, Alexa, play “Disco Duck.” Oh, how I wish you’d been my client.   Sweet Stuff                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Jason loved whipped cream and sex. He licked it off Maureen’s breasts, had her lick it off his balls. Maureen was a librarian. She wanted to prove she wasn’t a prude. But the whole thing made her gag. And everything got so sticky. “Hey, the end is always sticky. Right?” her husband said. “You know I love you, sweetie.” He slapped her ass playfully, turning to the T.V. to watch The Dallas Cowboys. *** Maureen loved whipped cream and sex. But Jason hated it—it was downright weird. Especially since she was a kindergarten teacher! But he loved Maureen so he put up with it once a month. Now, however, Maureen wouldn’t make love—actually she used the “F” word, which made Jason cringe—unless whipped cream was involved. Then she insisted they go to Good Vibrations and browse. She wanted to buy a vibrator and other things Jason couldn’t even say out loud. He shuddered.  *** Maureen and Jason loved whipped cream and sex. They were both artists and what was more artful than sex? They experimented with whipped cream bikinis topped with cherries, nipple strawberries. She had multiple orgasms when he licked chocolate sauce off her upper thighs. *** Jason loved whipped cream and sex. Maureen hated it, especially since he decided whipped cream was getting boring and now wanted her to lick maple syrup off his body. Honey. Warm pudding. She could say no. She was a VP in tech, in charge of hundreds. One day she did say no. “You fat bitch,” said Jason. He unzipped his pants and smeared his cock with caramel sauce. “Suck it,” he commanded. She did. On his birthday, she surprised him. New negligee. A gift box with delectable treats. Seductive smile. She tied his hands with silk scarves. She painted him with honey, molasses, sugar. He moaned more intensely than she’d ever heard. “The pièce de   resistance,” she purred, opening a jar, pouring. The fire ants spilled out. Rocket Mom                                                                                                                    After Mom leaves and Dad grows more obsessed with model rockets, Elle and I are no longer content to play our five senses games, like tasting rain and smelling stones. Instead, we write Mom into Elton John’s song “Rocket Man.” In “Rocket Mom,” we make her destruct for all kinds of reasons.  Her launch lugs bleed into her body tube. Her thrust and burn rate increase too quickly. She slashes her parachute line. In other versions of “Rocket Mom,” her launch is seamless, and she shoots all the way to the exosphere, mingling with aurora borealis, those green swirling ribbons of light.         I could go on and on and on, rewriting our song. But my sister grows bored. She goes with Dad to a model rocket exhibition one day. Dad helps her start a model rocket club in her fourth-grade class.         I start middle school. I watch Elle and Dad build and launch their first rocket with a plastic body tube and a bright red nose cone. They name it Rudolph. I watch them build and launch Skywalker, Falcon, Phoenix, Starfire. I start high school.         A boy. Older than me. Drawn by the rockets my father is small-time famous for now, but soon drawing me in charcoal. My hands, my face. He explains that drawing charcoal is made of willow branches or grape vines. I tell Dad and Elle this, but they are deep in a discussion about fiberglass vs. quantum tubing.         The boy draws my breasts in watercolor pencils. He teaches me about tones and shades, smudge factors. For my birthday, he paints me in a forest of rockets, flowers growing from their nose cones. He calls me beloved.          Mom fires back into our lives. Words explode between her and dad, tangled rebar and pulverized concrete. Debris pelts us.         I tell no one about the baby growing inside my 15-year-old body. Only the boy. Who is tender and lullabies me with his plans of flight for us. I lie in bed, stroking my belly. Elle’s steady breathing, rain tinkling against the window. I think of how we used to tilt our heads up to the sky and name the flavors of rain.  Claudia Monpere’s flash appears in Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, Craft, Flash Frog, Trampset, The Forge,  and elsewhere. She won the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review , the Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine , and the 2023 Smokelong Workshop Prize. She has stories in Best Small Fictions 2024 and 2025 and Best Microfiction 2025.

The St Augustine Diet Osceola, Billy P, starved himself just so, slipped like soap through the window and the grasp, chiefly on his own, and away yet again. The air as thick as he was now thin; hot as he was cunning, tenacious, so full of mosquitoes. The hope wafted around, flitted everywhere, little helicopters  looking for a purchase that matters. R James Sennett Jr lives, works, breathes and chases his muse in Louisville, Kentucky. His poetry has appeared in numerous publications for which he is grateful.

What Doesn’t Kill You The mulberry leaves have faded to a papery yellow, again. We’ve almost lost this plant twice—rescuing it from dehydration ( Have you watered it? No, I thought you had?),  only to see it washed out in the Summer storms. I’ve been feeding it diluted nutrients slowly, slowly, until its pale veins coursed with green, and its foliage softened and flushed with colour. Looking closer, I see tiny buds sprouting from the stalks. I rub a leaf between my fingers—glossier than last week at least. I breathe, for the first time in months.  # The day our eldest dog died, the snapdragon plant near her kennel produced one perfect flower—pink and red, vivid with grief. It took weeks for the flower to fall off, but once it did, the plant began to wither, and a brown death crept over it. One by one, its leaves turned to gold, until only a stump remained. Each time we tell that story, it blooms all over again. # Survive, from Latin supervivere “to live beyond,” to get through, to make it past, hold on, keep upright, Sanskrit jīvati “to live,” to keep moving, Old English lifian “to remain, continue,” to comprehend, to hurt, to heal.  # Our youngest dog lies in his dead sister’s kennel, paws curled. He yips softly, eyes dull and dark. At ten-to-six, the motorway traffic crescendos up the mountain. I open the door and he trots inside, pressing his full weight against me. I know, I know. # My husband and I are standing outside, barefoot in early Autumn. The dog’s head is under the couch, fishing for a ball. We survey the patio, catalogue each herb and flower.  I moved the lemon balm into a new corner. The rosemary is doing well. So is the fern, shooting lettuce-like leaves from its roots. A bright fan of rescued lilies has also bloomed overnight in shocking orange. I slip my hand into his and point to the mulberry. Look, new growth. Polyphony All I can hear is everything. Baked-on rice scraped off the pan with a fingernail, the water running, next door’s car pulling into the driveway, one car door closes, then another, slick tyres on the road, the stickiness of wet paws on the floor, the lap of water against snout, hair creeping out of its black band, settling around my ears. I think about what I can reach for faster, my loops or my earphones, wanting to suction something into my canals to muffle the sharp edges of every sound, but I also don’t want to be dramatic. Instead I am rooted to the kitchen floor. I want to say something but I can’t hear myself through the cacophony and so I wait for the car to be exited, for the water to be lapped, the tap stilled. He touches my arm and I watch it jolt, his lips are against my cheek and I flinch, then feel bad, say, its not you . He nods, withdraws. Cold air slices through the crack in the door and I can feel damp cotton sweat against my ribs. The tap is running again, he is washing out the debris in the sink. I start to speak then stop. What , he says. I shake my head, over and over again.  I can’t stop listening. The watch haptic buzzes against my wrist bone. Breathe, says the pulsing quiet. Erica Wheadon is an Australian writer and photographer. She holds an M.A. in Writing & Literature from Deakin University and her work has appeared in Island and StylusLit. She lives in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland with her husband, dog, and about 300 rainforest birds.

“Because it’s life-changing!” a middle-aged woman in a woven poncho joyfully screamed when asked why she was competing for the $50,000 prize. Maire Cletz, the region’s most popular news personality, slowly continued down the line recording everyone’s answer. “It will be so much fun! Wooooo,” a thirtysomething skater dude shouted, his face painted red, a pair of plastic devil horns atop his head. Finally, she reached me.  “I’m an artist. I’m doing it for my art,” I said loudly. Joylessly. Hoping everyone in line overheard. The contest, a promotion for the once-popular mountaintop theme park Ghost Town in the Sky, would award the person who could complete the most laps on the park’s premier attraction, the Red Devil roller coaster. It’s not overly thrilling, just a loop followed by a couple of drawn-out helices, but it’s intimidating for most because of its unique location on the side of the mountain. Instead of beginning with a traditional lift hill followed by a drop, it leaves the station, rounds a corner, and immediately dives off the cliff and into the loop.  A local radio station sponsored the event, blasting well-curated songs such as “Rollercoaster of Love” and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” A popular restaurant catered it with complimentary drinks and snacks, including devil’s blood cocktails, red velvet cake, and deviled eggs. Entertainers in western wear performed choreographed battles against entertainers in Native American headdresses.  Documenting the event: local news crews, the Discovery Channel, and several roller coaster enthusiast clubs, all of whom captured the still circulating video footage and photographs. And then of course myself, as this was my thesis for an MFA in Performance Art. Using a disposable kodak, I’d snap photos of myself throughout the contest, accurately capturing the stress winning the grand prize caused my body and mind - the prize symbolizing the American dream, and the contest, the price to achieve it in the contemporary capitalist system of the 1990s. I’d pair the photos with an essay, throwing in quotes from buzz names like Marx, and Barthes, and Butler. For sure I’d win the award for distinguished thesis. And the $50,000, which I didn’t care about aside from it strengthening my statement. As the 28 of us competitors took our seats, the park president explained the rules: 20hours and 40minutes of riding daily; food, drink, restroom visits and the like reserved for our two 10-minute and two 30-minute breaks; sleeping permitted only in our assigned coaster seats during our nightly two-hour break. Sounded intense, but I had little concern. By the looks of my competitors, all older, I didn’t expect they could outlast me. My goal was to win with as little time as needed to generate compelling material for my piece. I estimated it should take about five to six hours. Following the recitation of the rules, the DJ led the crowd in a 30 second countdown as station attendants lowered our restraints. Seated next to me in the front row, a freckled woman in hazardous headwear - a sun bonnet, tied tightly under her chin, with feathers clipped to the sides.  She grabbed my hand with a smile and pointed at herself while shouting out of the right corner of her mouth, “Lisa! Lisa!”   The countdown reached one. Before I could introduce myself, the crowd cheered in a swarm of glittery red confetti, the train exited the station, turned the corner, and dropped us into the loop. Lisa threw her arms in the air shouting, “Whoomp there it is!” The ride, a bit shakier than I remembered, wasn’t intense, but I needed to brace during the transition into the first helix to avoid slamming against the side of the cart. Lisa stopped shouting when we reached the lift hill to the station. As we made the ascent, riders behind us laughed and buzzed about building pools, starting their children’s college funds, and paying off credit card debt. Upon our return, the crowd of spectators chanted “Number two, number two.” We exited the station again. Lisa repeatedly shouted, “Whoomp there it is,” I assumed with the intent of annoying me out of the competition. After the loop, I braced for the transition into the first helix. Moments later, we reached the lift hill. This time, I introduced myself to Lisa. “How many times have you ridden, Ryan?” she asked, still speaking out of the corner of her mouth. “Oh. At least 15 times,” I said, despite only having ridden it twice a few years back. “Wow, just 15? You didn’t train?” she asked as we reached the station.  The crowd chanted, “number three! number three!” “Train?” I asked with a laugh. She looked at me with pity as we dove off the cliff. Now preoccupied with my lack of training and Lisa’s superior skills, I forgot to brace for the helix. My ribs slammed into the side of the cart. I screamed, grabbing hold of my right side. I was in pain, but at least the likely bruise would make a good photograph. Lisa took notice of my injury but continued shouting, “Whoomp there it is.” When we reached the lift hill, she said, “That’s why we train.” “So, you’ve done this before?” I asked, already knowing the answer. She nodded with a quiet laugh and began counting on her fingers, “Belmont Park, Coney Island, Magic Mountain, Great Adventure, Kennywood, Knoebel’s, Bush Gardens – The Dark Continent and  The Old Country – Kings Dominion, Astroworld, Kings Island, and Cedar Point. I’m forgetting – Oh! Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, Opryland, and Dollywood. You could say I’m on the circuit.” “The circuit?” “Oh yeah,” Lisa said, nodding. Her tone serious. “It’s how I make a living.” At the station, Lisa waved to a group of women all in bonnets with feathers attached just like hers. The chanting was losing steam, and the crowd at the station had thinned a bit, but the festivities continued.  The DJ announced, “Number two on the Billboard Hot 100 for its sixth week, this goes out to a special lady vying for her fifteenth win. Let’s give it up for the queen herself, Looping Lisa!”  The crowd screamed as Lisa blew kisses. “Whoomp There it Is,” blasted from the speakers. After lap five, a man sitting six rows behind us shouted, “I’m out!”  Spectators covered their mouths and pointed. Some cried in disappointment. The sound of the man’s heaving wrestled with the bass of “Devil Inside.” Lisa and I turned around just as he jumped from the train, splattering cocktail-colored vomit across the station floor. Crowd members closed their eyes. Some made noises of disgust. A station attendant approached the rider with a bottle of water, sitting him down in the corner. Another grabbed a mop. With hope of gaining intel about what it might take to win, after the next lap, I asked Lisa, “What’s the longest you’ve been on one of these?” She immediately replied, “70 days. Belmont Park. Five years ago.” “Days?” I asked. “Dayyyys.” She repeated. “They stopped the contest early because of wear and tear on the track and split the winnings between the last five of us. They threw in a trip to Hawaii for each of us, too. I would have outlasted everyone. It’s still a win in my book.” She shrugged her shoulders. After hour one, Lisa finally stopped shouting, “Whoomp there it is.” I stopped counting laps and talking to Lisa around hour two. I needed to save my energy. I wanted to live in the moment. I took in the view of the Smoky Mountains and the turning leaves. I caught snippets of birds feeding their young and squirrels filling their cheeks.  Not long after sundown, the celebration ceased, the park shuttered, and the catering crew taunted us by moving small tables of leftover cocktails and snacks to the station. The void left by the exodus of the parkgoers and the DJ, the closed games and rides, stripped us of welcome distractions. The sound of the wheels slamming into the helix became louder and now included a dull scratching. Having a suitable number of bruises by this point, I braced tighter in my attempts to remain injury-free.  During hour seven, several more people dropped out. The last one, a heavyset bald man in a Cedar Point shirt who Lisa knew from the circuit, cried. “It’s time to put that one out to pasture,” she said. “Never lasts an entire day and cries every time. As if he ever has a chance.”  A few others huddled in the corner, eating leftover finger foods off Chinet plates. I felt bad for the losers and their crushed dreams, looking so pathetic under their blankets, so I made eye contact and smiled at one as she bit into a deviled egg. She quickly looked away and nudged the man next to her, shaking her head vigorously as she spoke to him. They both scowled at me as the train departed the station.  While upside down, I fantasized about red velvet cake and vodka. I hoped there was cake left when it was time for our next 10-minute break. To take my mind off the things I couldn’t have, I thought about what I would do with the “life-changing” sum of $50,000 if I actually cared about it: buy a brand-new Suzuki Samurai, get stoned in the recently unified Germany, create a cold-war-themed performance piece on a frozen canal in the former East Berlin. We hit the helix before I could think of more and my neck jerked. I thought I heard a pop. I felt pain all the way to my right fingertips. The train stopped and three more riders exited. Two of them hugged, sobbing and mumbling, their long hair tangling with their embrace. The only thing I could make out through the cries was “for my daughter.” It hurt to turn my neck left or right, but I didn’t want my competitors to see my weakness. I smiled through the pain, unintentionally making eye contact with the deviled egg woman. She took a bite of red velvet cake, licked her fingers, sipped a devil’s blood cocktail. I quickly turned my head, shooting pain down my neck and arm. It was dawn and a few hours after our sleepless two-hour sleep break when I first questioned my ability to continue. There were eight of us left. No more deviled eggs. No more red velvet cake. The station empty, except for a documentary crew, a couple of recent dropouts, and the third-shift ride operators. They tried to lift our spirits by counting down the laps until our 30-minute break. We coasted into the loop. The sun rose over the mountains like that Hudson River School painting at my university. The cool air felt fresh against my face. The helix added grinding to its cacophonous catalogue of sounds. My upper, middle, and lower back hurt. The bruises on my torso and legs and the puffy dark circles under my eyes were proof of what I had endured. Maybe failing to achieve the American dream would make a more powerful statement? But now I felt I deserved the $50,000. During the 30-minute break, I ran to the vending machine for Diet Cokes and Kit Kat bars. At the station, I saw Lisa stretching and rubbing Tiger Balm on her bruised thighs. “Ya drink any water?” she asked, taking notice of my sodas.  “Not yet,” I said. She looked at her watch and shoved her tub of Tiger Balm into my hand. “Need some?” “Could you take photos of my bruises first?” I asked, handing her my camera. “My puffy eyes, too.”  I lifted my shirt to expose the large bruise that covered part of my ribcage and leaned against the red station wall. “A full body shot and some closeups.” “That’s a goodie,” she said. I sat on the cold floor and massaged my neck with the cream as Lisa left the station. I mixed diet Coke with the Polish potato vodka hidden in my knapsack and finished a Kit Kat within seconds, doing my best to take photos of myself while doing so. The operators announced 15 minutes left of the break. I inhaled the scent of Tiger Balm before rubbing some into my lower back. Lisa returned with two bottles of Evian. “Need some?” she asked while slamming both down in front of me. “I’m your competition,” I said. “I know, but I don’t want you to be in pain. And I know I can beat you,” she laughed, punching my right arm, sending a jolt down my neck. 30 seconds left as I returned from the last-minute restroom visit Lisa “suggested.” I doubled the pace of my steps even though my enthusiasm had now dipped to half empty. At this point I’d rather keep eating Kit Kats and drinking Polish potato vodka. I’d rather watch the morning light turn to afternoon. I’d rather cheer for Looping Lisa or the woman competing for her daughter’s college fund than I would myself. What I didn’t want was my competitors thinking me pathetic while I chewed Kit Kats underneath a blanket. The attendants slammed down our restraints. The operator punched the green button. The rattling of wheels on metal became white noise. The tinges of pain with each shake became bearable. My desire to continue returned. At 11 a.m., the park opened for business. The losers’ vacant seats now filled by the paying public, free to come and go as they pleased. They objectified us with their glances, patronized us with words of encouragement. I scowled at them like the deviled egg woman did me. After seven days, only three of us remained: Lisa, a guy in the back of the train named Jeff, who Lisa knew from the circuit, and me. Lisa estimated, based on Jeff’s past performances, that he had about forty days left in him. “He needs an attitude adjustment,” she said. “So entitled every time.” Lisa wasn’t so far off. On day 44, Jeff dropped out, kicking the side of the train. He fell to the floor with his head in his hands. Forty-four days of his life wasted. I thought about the deviled egg woman, sad after only five or six hours of wasted time. She was at least able to eat leftover finger foods before returning to her regular life the next day. What would Jeff be returning to? What would I be returning to? An MFA in Performance Art and a beat-up body? Even though I believed I couldn’t beat Lisa, I felt I had reached the point of no return. I deserved the $50,000. I wanted the $50,000. On day 52,   an hour before park closing, the few public riders behind us shouted in fear when the train jackhammered in the helix. I was numb to most sensations at this point, but I felt the jolt and recognized it as more severe than it had been just 10 or 15 laps earlier. “Not good,” Lisa shouted out of the corner of her mouth.  After their ride, the non-competitors braced their necks and backs as they alerted the attendants of the issue. “It’s just not right,” a woman with two children said.  The attendants, shrugging their shoulders and rolling their eyes, filled seats with new riders.  “But she’s right,” Lisa said in anger, “it isn’t right!”  Before the attendant lowered our restraints, Lisa jumped from the train and tiptoed to the operators’ booth. “Need to call your supervisor?” she said sternly from the corner of her mouth, pointing to the phone. The operator shook his head in silence as the attendant lowered my restraint and signaled all clear. As the train began moving, Lisa held her arms out, mouth agape. The contest was officially over. On my victory lap I caught the sunset from the Red Devil for the 52nd time. I thought about my new Suzuki Samurai as I hung upside down in the loop and shouted, “Whoomp there it is.” I braced for the helix like a pro. Wheels screeched. The train violently shook side to side. Sparks flew up beside me like the Fourth of July, engulfing me in that smell that never signals something good. We lost speed, but not fast enough to keep the cart from disengaging from the track. My stomach slammed against the restraint as the car, still tethered to the rest of the train, halted midair, its nose pointing south. I dangled alone, staring at the steep mountain grade below. It was peacefully quiet until a rider in the second car, just barely off the track, began praying loudly. Assorted shrieks and cries followed. Someone farther back shouted, “Call EMS! Please.”  Now I could hear the buzz of terror from parkgoers on top of the mountain and Lisa screaming, “Ryan. Ryan. Are you ok?” from the corner of her mouth.  I was scared to breathe or speak. The restraint, uncomfortably pressing into my abdomen, still held me, but how long would the car remain attached to the train.  It wasn’t long before the news crews were on site. Emergency vehicles trailed behind.   In   the early morning of day 53, they removed us one-by-one from the derailed Red Devil roller coaster. News crews followed as paramedics wrapped me in a blanket and wheeled me from the cherry picker to the ambulance.  “Was the win worth it?” a reporter shouted as she and her crew shoved a microphone and camera close to my face. I didn’t know what to say. “Are roller coasters safe? Is the park at fault?” She asked. I didn’t know what to say. “Sir. Do you have anything to share about your terrifying experience?” “Whoomp there it is,” I managed to shout before passing out. Joseph A. Gross is a queer writer and performer. His writing has most recently appeared in Maudlin House. In his spare time, he enjoys hiking, riding roller coasters, and watching rodents eat.

In November of last year, I was bubbly with excitement about my life. By December, I was a weepy, barely functional mess. Nothing changed over that month. The excitement was over my recent move from Berlin to Lisbon to take up a six-year research fellowship. It came after fifteen years of zipping around between different countries for much shorter postdoctoral gigs and, most recently, a year of nerve-wracking unemployment in which my academic career looked to be over. I’d been so relieved to stay in academia – to experience it in Lisbon no less, a city everyone had nice things to say about. I would have all the freedom I longed for and more job security than I’d ever enjoyed. I could barely believe my luck. Until, virtually from one day to the next, it felt meaningless.  Is there a non-cringe way to broach a midlife crisis? The term smacks of frivolity and self-indulgence, all divorced dad trading off family for sports car and stripper, or alcoholic housewife no longer needed by her children. I balked at the stereotypes, but the symptoms – boredom with things that once absorbed you, nostalgia for feelings long gone, wondering why you’re doing the things you do, what the point of them even is,    and how much longer you can keep doing them, hankering after a different life – were undeniable.  It took me a while to utter the words “midlife crisis” but, as soon as I did, the floodgates opened. My friends – not even some of them, most of my friends – responded with versions of “welcome to the club.” One took quiet quitting to extremes: hiding behind the locked door of her campus office to read romance novels all day. Another lamented his dullness: in his twenties, he wrote poetry and made art and composed music and now all he did was work. Another, still, said her job felt pointless and her marriage beyond repair. She’d consulted a divorce lawyer and wished to take her kids and run, spending her days in political activism.  “But you have everything you wanted,” said my mother quite reasonably over the phone. She’d prayed for me to get the fellowship and was almost as happy as I was when I did. She asked what a midlife crisis meant. “ I  never had a midlife crisis,” she said when I explained it, then she called out: “Moti! Have you ever had a midlife crisis?” muffled sounds and then: “Your father never had one either.” I somehow made it to middle age without a marriage to wreck or children to abandon but there was the job. Research had long lost its luster for me, though I appreciated the lifestyle. Research was the game I had to play to maintain this lifestyle. Exciting, it was not, but sometimes I’d enjoyed aspects of it. Now it felt insufferable. Six years, a godsend when I was awarded the fellowship, loomed ahead like a prison sentence. But like some lifers behind bars for their entire adulthood, I didn’t know what to do with myself if released. A memoir I finished writing shortly after my move to Portugal represented my only escape route, but its failure to win over agents rendered this route delusional.  I cut more and more corners at work. Experience taught me how to get decent mileage out of scant fieldwork data, so I assembled the bare minimum. Instead of aiming for high-quality publications, I churned out inferior, low-effort ones. Even so, I was unable to carry out the most routine tasks without staring into space or dissolving into tears. I tried consulting the scholarship on midlife crisis but there wasn’t much to go by. Academics didn’t take it seriously. It is difficult to pin down. The age boundaries keep shifting and the symptoms are far from distinct. I found surveys indicating a U-shape in wellbeing across the lifespan, with middle age as its low point. Studies of great apes exhibiting the same nadir hinted at biological causes. Among humans, though, the low appeared more common in high-income countries, indicating a wholly different (dare I repeat self-indulgent) set of triggers. Shit does tend to happen in midlife, though: marriages sour, careers stagnate, loved ones die or fall off. Calling it a midlife crisis lends it a certain gravitas. And I never could resist sensationalizing my life. Much of it homebound, I still romanticized the diminutive stirrings of my even-keeled disposition. Now that the stirrings have grown tempestuous, I needed them to mean something. I would stop worrying about the reality of the crisis, then, and mine it for insight as a trope.  My first attempts were discouraging. Literature has typically glamorized a trite version (described by Mark Jackson in Intimate History of the Midlife Crisis )   whereby  middle-aged men break free of the stranglehold of occupational and marital conformity   in a heroic reassertion of their individuality. Unable to flatter myself that much, I gravitated to the social sciences, my natural terrain. In The Normal Chaos of Love ,  Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck- Gernsheim identify the midlife crisis as a sociological rather than a psychological event. In pre-industrial times, there was little room for self-discovery but now, you were encouraged to test out motley identities and take responsibility for whatever meaning they helped you wrest out of an insecure existence. Realizing you probably had many years to live after establishing a home and career made you dream up a better life through personal reinvention.  MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya opens  Midlife: A Philosophical Guide  with his own midlife crisis which – relatable to me – involved academic work wearing thin. Setiya deals with his by doing what he knows best, namely delving into philosophy. It makes for an inspiring read, but I wasn’t swayed by the conclusion. Tracing the midlife crisis to the tyranny of projects that tend to plateau around midlife, Setiya espoused finding joy in action: not the completed book but the writing itself and so forth.  I’d have taken kindlier to it had the book included a how-to component. My life, too, revolved around projects. I wrote for the sake of publishing. Read for edification. Watched shows to improve my Portuguese. And those were the enjoyable activities! I also worked out daily to keep my weight and mood in check, but it was distinctly unfun. Academic work, I was either bored by or actively hated. My self-care consisted of piercing my face back and forth with a needle roller because I associated beauty with pain. In fact, any accomplishment not associated with pain was suspect to me. Few things I did were genuinely pleasurable and next to none were pleasurable in their own right.  It hadn’t bothered me before, but it did now. I learned that the midlife crisis afflicted people once their lives stabilized. Struggles behind, they took stock of gratifications delayed and responsibilities shouldered. Small wonder they’d want to let loose and prioritize pleasure. I wanted that too. Or rather, that’s what I thought I wanted. Maybe it’s what I thought I should want. I felt so discombobulated that I was never quite sure. I feared having become so repressed I’d lost sight of my true desires.  The confusion led me to Michel Onfray’s A Hedonist Manifesto, advocating through thinkers ancient and modern for a life of pleasure. “Pleasure scares people,” Onfray writes, and I felt a pang of recognition. Pleasure certainly scared me, with its threat of derailing my Projects and Routines. Still, Onfray’s version was one I could live with. It was a carefully plotted out pleasure under tight rein. “We make a list of what delightful things could happen, what distresses could occur, what will be pleasant or disagreeable, and then we judge, doubt, and calculate before acting.”  Onfray bunches under “hedonistic morality” attributes like thoughtfulness, commitment, generosity, and effort. Arguing against those who associate hedonism with egoism, he insists that “any kind of pleasure-arithmetic entails a concern for others… Others’ joy leads to my own joy; others’ discomfort produces my own discomfort.” I didn’t buy it as a philosophy. Onfray’s hedonism evoked the generalized good will of a gated community – conditions unattainable for most of mankind. Still, I was captivated by his notion of pleasure for its own sake, especially when shared. It sounded like a nice way to live life. Even this tamed pleasure felt out of reach, though. Perhaps for that reason, I recognized it as a possible escape route from the rut I was in. This, too, was no how-to book, so I had to work out for myself how to put hedonism into practice. Doing what, though? I contemplated the rejuvenating power of nature OKAY NO I thought about sex. Lest I stand accused of having contrived a convoluted path to the most clichéd of midlife-crisis excesses, allow me to clarify that this was not the place to which my mind would normally wander. At this point in my life, I had not had sex – not so much as kissed or even lusted after a man – in about ten years, for reasons. Nothing could be farther from my lackluster, passionless life. My libido, if it still existed, was dormant. Having sex again would be a sea change. Feeling insecure about the next step, I asked my friend John, who dated frequently, for advice. He told me not to worry. At least in the first encounters, the men would do everything. “You could be completely passive and nonverbal,” he said: “honestly, you could be a corpse. But you do have to set boundaries. Girls these days like it rough and guys kind of expect that.” This was news to me. My usual porn search term was “tender” to which I defaulted after “sex with a man who cares deeply about his friends and family” yielded no result. I took the leap and opened a profile on a dating app, opting for minimalism. Later, a man told me that what he liked about it was that it seemed to be saying “I don’t give a fuck.” One of my photos was posted sideways and I never bothered to rotate it. The entirety of the text read “New to Lisbon and to online dating. Looking only for something casual.” It turned out to be enough. In hindsight, I benefited from Portuguese women being on the conservative side, or so I’ve been told repeatedly by sexually frustrated Portuguese men.  I was overwhelmed by the attention I received. Shocked, really. I knew in theory that this was how dating apps worked but I never expected it to apply to women of, ahem, a certain age. “I can’t believe how easy this is,” I told friends. The men among them set me straight. “Congratulations on being a woman” said one. The following weeks were revelatory. Take the men. All of them younger, sometimes scandalously younger. Nice, too: they paid me compliments and I ate it up. Contrary to John’s warnings, they were not at all rough (one asked politely if he could pull on my hair and then gave it a gentle little tug).  And they had something to teach me. After filtering for appearance on account of I am shallow, I selected men who described themselves as hedonists, bon vivants, free spirits, and living life to its fullest. It was a calculated departure. Past Me would have gone for smart, arguably at odds with “I wake up every day with a smile.” But if I was to turn pleasure into the pivot of my new life, I needed adept guides.  Adept they were, and I was a keen apprentice. Onfray’s principle of taking and giving pleasure became my moral compass. If it didn’t come naturally at first, I was getting better at it. My libido, too, had stirred back to life. A milestone was one Sunday early afternoon when I felt horny. It took me a minute to recognize it because horniness in the abstract was something I hadn’t felt in years. I wanted sex right away and the particulars hardly mattered. I opened the app and chatted with several men at once in search of the first available, cutting off those who mentioned “tonight” or “this week.” An Italian expat finally rose to the occasion, inviting me over to his place, in convenient walking distance from mine. I accepted and, not two hours later, I was back home with an afterglow. I also aspired to get out my head and give myself over fully to the experience. It wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped. “Have a glass of wine before” suggested my friend Pedro. “I usually do” I said. “Then have two.” But I didn’t want to be intoxicated on alcohol. I wanted to be intoxicated on life! What a delightful conclusion to my midlife crisis that would be. Alas, my pleasure was mediated by self-discovery and growth. Yet again, I had a project. The most pleasurable aspect of even the good sex was having it count towards the realization of this project. Seeing as my ultimate goal was pleasure for its own sake, it felt self-defeating in a way I couldn’t untangle.  Then came Rui. He wanted to meet on the same day we matched but I was on my period. He suggested we wait, then, as the things he was best at were incompatible. He went into titillating detail, intoning that his greatest pleasure was giving pleasure. We made plans for later that week and I wrote back “looking forward!!” which is the extent of my sexting capacity.  We met at the bar near my house. Rui oozed masculinity and not of the toxic, macho kind. Of the easily confident, greatest-pleasure-is-giving-pleasure kind. A private chef, he described an elaborate dish he cooked for his client, taking two hours to prepare. “What do you cook for yourself?” I asked. “The same,” he replied, “I also like to eat.”  I couldn’t wait to touch him and, as soon as we stepped into my apartment, I did. Specifically, I ran my fingers through his hair. He had an irresistible thicket of black curls, and I loved that I had to reach way up to touch them. He loved that I was “so small.” Rui was not lying about his skills: I came quick and hard. “What can I do for you?” I asked after catching my breath. “You can let me give you another orgasm,” he said as a chorus hummed and angels flapped their wings.  Rui would’ve been the lover to end all lovers, but he was noncommittal. I accepted it with magnanimity in the Onfray persuasion. Every woman – especially every middle-aged woman – could use a Rui in her life, and I was happy for my sisters to experience the pleasure I had. Finally feeling myself something of a hedonist, I turned to Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. I read the book with skepticism back in graduate school, but now I was feeling more receptive. Its point is to challenge Sigmund Freud's proposition that the struggle for existence in the face of scarcity required the libido’s deflection towards socially useful activity like work and procreation. Freud held that you had to give up “destructive” pleasure for the more restrained, expedient sort. For Marcuse, this was nothing other than a symptom of domination. The very word “productivity” implied, to him, internalized repression or its philistine glorification (ouch, I thought as I read it: I evaluated most days by how productive I was). Obsessing over work was neurotic: an attempt to make yourself feel important, even when there was no particular need for your work (ouch again).  Marcuse envisioned a non-repressive society whose members would be re-sexualized away from “genital supremacy” and towards “polymorphous perversity” – deriving erotic pleasure out of every part of the body. Such pleasure would incessantly build up and intensify. To me, it sounded exhausting, and it only got worse: the pleasure orientation would doubtlessly engender fresh pains, frustrations and conflicts, even as these, too, would be infused with value. I still had a way to go. Even post-Rui, I related so much more to the productivity Marcuse mocked than to the pleasure he championed. Grad school muscle memory made me pick up the ultimate anti-Marcuse book next: Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality . I remembered the argument in broad strokes: don’t think that by saying yes to sex you’re saying no to power because nowhere are we more deeply controlled than through our sexuality itself. I was having laborious sex that night when it came to mind. Not the argument, just the fact that I could be at home making headway with the book. Preferring Foucault over sex cast a shadow over my personal reinvention.   A few days later, I hopped into bed with a charming artist – at least he charmed me by speaking intelligently about art – and then he couldn’t get an erection. He was flustered, I waved it off, but, after he left, I was crestfallen. He was in his thirties, a non-smoker, and we had not been drinking. I could think of no reason for why this should have happened other than that I was a decrepit old hag. I glared at my body in the mirror. My sex-appeal defunct, I would have to sublimate through strolls in the park.  It weighed on me heavily for most of the following day. Then, the Italian within walking distance asked if I felt like coming over again for a quicky. Giddy with relief, I texted back that I was busy. I wasn’t, but he had already granted me the validation I needed: sex was redundant.  So much for hedonism.  My Berlin friend Andreas was not surprised. All of his one-time acid dropping, gay sex-club patronizing friends were now walking their dogs, doing home repairs, and growing fat. What they realized was that hedonism distracted you from your goals. No, there was no balance to be had: you ended up on Grindr every half hour because it took over. “I know you, Hadas, you need security.” Hedonism was its opposite, it destabilized you. All of the hedonists Andreas knew proved the rule. You didn’t behave that way if you were happy.  Another Berlin friend, Alina, also saw it coming. Open the door to pleasure and the psychic tumult comes flooding along with it. You couldn’t pick and choose. But in contrast to Andreas, she was all for it. For years, she’d been claiming that I had too little pleasure in my (admittedly sedate) life and that, as a result, I was confusing contentment with happiness. I didn’t think I was, and now I missed the contentment, even if that’s all it was. I had already gotten my share of tumult with the midlife crisis. My feelings were swinging wild and loose for months now: pleasure was supposed to restabilize me.   But in pushing her agenda, Alina was conflating two things. What she was referring to – what I had precious little of before and what knocked me right off balance now – was not pleasure but desire. Pleasure was nothing: quick to satisfy, it was also easier to control. Desire, gushing out of darker reaches of the psyche, was more chaotic – hijacking your brain until you couldn’t think straight, keeping you up at night pining and plotting intrigue, making you do unwise and regrettable things.  Desire played no part in my hookups. With the men I met, sex was a foregone conclusion unless I pulled the stops. My pleasure in these encounters lasted for exactly as long as the sex had. As soon as it was over, I would leave or send them off. And since there was usually someone else lined up, I barely gave them a second thought. And yet I was consumed by desire throughout this time – a scorching, ravenous desire. It wasn’t about sex, but about my memoir. It was the first I’d written and I knew it to be flawed. I yearned pitifully for it to be chosen, taken up by an agent or an editor with a “hands on approach” (their webpages were more arousing to me than any dating profile).  The desire was infantile, as desires go: to be seen for the person I could be, the person I believed I inherently was, to be nurtured into becoming that person. Virtually begging for it left me more threadbare and exposed than sex ever had, like laying naked, my middle-aged limbs asplay, facing a flaccid penis.  Was I trying to use pleasure to distract myself from desire? If so, it was no match. I did enjoy the sex, but my attention wasn’t devoured by it, and it was a far cry from polymorphous perversity. Kissing, for example, did nothing for me, a mere prelude to sex, like a book’s preface I didn’t mind skimming but could do without. I recalled the weak-in-the-knees ecstasy the French Kiss used to unleash in me. Before I was 18, when it was as far as I got, I thought I might die every time I had one. I wanted to relive that feeling! But then, why should I? Do we get to relive any of our firsts? I certainly didn’t immerse myself in novels the way I used to, when the worlds they conjured up were more real to me than the one I lived in. But chemistry couldn’t fix that. Pleasure might be different.  “I’m going to say something very un-feminist,” said a friend. I knew where she was headed because I’d read about it on the Internet. A diminished sex-drive was a common enough symptom of perimenopause. This was the same friend whose marriage was dead and whose job felt pointless. A couple of months after that confession, she reported that she was putting minimal effort into her job. As for the marriage, the children were still young. You didn’t break up a family just like that. She was taking estrogen supplements, though, and they helped: sex was better and the moodiness was gone.  After I got off the phone with her, I searched online for a gynecologist and booked an appointment with a certain Dr. Costa. She was receiving patients at a nearby clinic called Hospital de Jesus, which I immediately took to calling The Jesus Hospital. Dr. Costa was in her sixties, and she insisted on running me through a series tests: a pap smear and referrals for a mammogram, an ultrasound and blood work.  I didn’t mind the tests so long as I left her office with a prescription. But she refused to give me one before receiving the results. Like everything else in Portugal, it would take time. Possibly a month. A month! “ Mas, mas,” I panted.   Dr. Costa spoke no English, and I had to convey the urgency in my halting Portuguese. “The sex is bad!” I cried: “One month is muito tempo  for bad sex!” Dr. Costa was not swayed. My pursuit of pleasure was in fact losing steam. Far from driving me to delirium, I engaged in it with the same no-nonsense sobriety I approached every project I’ve ever taken up. My phone now included contacts like “Hugo (the other one).” I’d meet them on a bad hair day with an air of “let’s get this over with.” Instead of putting out fresh sheets, I turned the pillow I drooled on to the other side. I scheduled hookups for 4pm specifically to pry myself away from my inbox. Some men, I felt no attraction to but told myself they might be otherwise useful. “Did this help you with your midlife crisis?” asked a 27-year-old after sex. “I’m not sure,” I said.  “It’s like the crisis I went through last year,” said my friend Dan. I remembered it well: a miserable episode that estranged him from his brother and lost him his house. “But it would be too presumptuous to call mine a midlife crisis.” Dan had terminal cancer, under control but doctors weren’t sanguine about the time he had left. Commenting on my sexcapades, Dan said that his own sex life was over: cancer was a turnoff to women. He wasn’t sad about it, not outwardly: just making the most of the time he had left. Our conversation gave me pause. Preoccupied with my crisis, I never questioned “midlife.” My reinvention took for granted a life long enough for New Me to unfurl. Even in my sorry state, I recoiled from the alternative. There would be no crisis if I didn’t fret so much about a vast, open-ended future. Bracketing it, though, would also dilute the fantasy, however vague, of the delights that lay ahead.  And I was addicted t0 fantasy. When not succumbing to panic attacks I was lost in reverie. On good days, it made writing and reading more fun than sex. It’s also what made Sex more fun than sex. Without fantasy, there’d be nothing to keep me going. Marcuse loved fantasy too. He considered it a refusal to accept any limitation on freedom. This refusal peeled away your skin, though. In projecting a future image of a yet unformed self, its realization magnified present deficiencies. I thought about it while heading back home from The Jesus Hospital, a month after my first visit. Going over my test results, Dr. Costa said that she would not prescribe me any hormones because no hormones were lacking. I’d admitted that I did find sex pleasurable, and she did not see the problem.  “Not pleasurable enough, though,” I could have told her. Not enough to reconcile me with the life I now disdained. Not enough to assuage my dread of a murky future. Not enough to resolve the mystery of how to inhabit it. Even in midlife, it impended with formidable immensity.  I didn’t argue with Dr. Costa this time because my mind was elsewhere. On the day before our appointment, I had a video call with an agent. She liked my memoir but asked for changes. Evasive about what would happen if I made them, she did dangle the possibility of matching me up with a publishing house whose editor would “share [my] vision.” My heart nearly leaped out of my chest. It was the first warm weekend after a month of incessant rain, and yet I never left my desk, not for a minute. Everyone was out and about, soaking up the sun: the sounds of merriment carried through my window. I also kept getting pesky texts from men I’d connected with, all the Hugos and Brunos and Alexandres asking if I was available. There were pleasures to be had, immediate and polymorphously perverse. But I was single minded. Old habits reasserting themselves, I knew exactly what I needed to do. Pleasure suspended, crisis deferred, I wrote and rewrote, my body contorted with desire, my mind abuzz with fear. Hadas Weiss is an anthropologist living in Lisbon. She is the author of We Have Never Been Middle Class (Verso) and of a still unpublished memoir of academic mishap.

Pledgemaster Brayden stood at the basement altar with his head hunched low to keep from hitting the pink insulation above. He was robed up in the chapter’s colors, red hood on and everything. We looked up at him from a circle of fold-out chairs. It was silent. This was a solemn occasion, after all. An emergency meeting.  “There is an issue with the pledges,” he said. We straightened in our seats. “A respect issue,” he said. We straightened ourselves even more. Then Brayden yelled. “They’re too laid back about initiation!” His voice echoed. He shook his head. The shadow from the overhead lights made his goatee look like a full-on beard. “There was an incident the other day: some of them were seen playing frisbee between classes.” He paused again. “Frisbee! At the start of I-Week! We earned our brotherhood. We suffered. And now it looks like we’re taking it easy on the pledges, like they’re better than us!” “Oh fuck no!” we yelled. We stomped.  “Do you remember what we went through?” continued Brayden. “They blindfolded my class and drove us into the woods. Someone went, ‘Campus is that way,’ and gestured toward some trees. Then they drove away. We had to walk for hours in the dark. I wasn’t sure we’d make it.” We cheered. Brayden went on. “And now our pledges are having a good time! Kyle, tell us what Pledge Russell said after his woods walk.” Brother Kyle scooched his chair back to stand. “Oh, uh, Russell thanked us for the workout. He said he'd skip cardio the next day. Dude gave me a high-five.” “A high-fucking-five!” yelled Brayden. “They need to learn respect! And they’ll learn best through hunger.” We roared. Brayden grinned. And it was decided: we would starve the pledges.  --- We confiscated their cafeteria cards and assigned brothers to mealtime supervisor shifts. The pledges were allowed half a chicken breast and a quarter cup of rice a day, no exceptions. The fat football pledge? Half a chicken breast. The hobbit pledge? Half a chicken breast. A day passed. Two. Three. There were reports of pledges playing pickup soccer. Rumors circulated that Russell had gotten laid. During I-Week! And so a second emergency meeting was called. Again, Brayden stooped beneath the pink insulation. “The fuckers must be sneaking snacks,” he said. “This is insult-to-injury territory now.” “Fuck those guys!” we yelled. “I have a new plan, though,” went Brayden. “Bring the pledges here tomorrow night.” --- The next night, we herded the ten pledges into the basement. We practically pushed them down the stairs, then actually pushed them onto the cracked concrete in the middle of the chairs. “Sit,” said Brayden. They sat on the floor. We stared down from our seats. They glanced at each other.  “You pledges think you’re so sneaky with your snacks,” said Brayden. “You couldn’t take a few days of being hungry.” His gaze settled on Russell in particular. Russell’s eyes were glazed over. Dude was wearing a striped bathrobe. “Well, we’ve heard you,” Brayden said. “And we’ve rethought our ways. In fact, we’re sorry. To apologize, we got you dinner.” Brayden raised a hand and snapped. The basement door opened and the smell of oil came in. Four brothers descended with a wooden board over their shoulders like pallbearers. There was a straight-up pyramid of McDonald’s Chicken McNugget boxes balanced on top. “We got you fifty boxes,” said Brayden. “Twenty nuggets in each. One thousand nuggets. A hundred for each pledge. It would be disrespectful to not eat all the food we bought you.”  The pledges glanced at each other. Their eyes darted. “Are you guys for real?” asked Russell. The other pledges looked his way. “Yes,” said Brayden, “You have one hour. And afterward, you’ll be cleaning your puke off the floor.” Then he laughed. We laughed. It echoed. The pallbearing brothers dropped the board in front of the pledges and the pyramid tumbled. Boxes scattered across the concrete. Nuggets spilled. The air was thick. There was a pause. Then Russell went, “Dude, I love McDonald’s.” “Yeah, dude, we got hella nugs,” said another pledge. They distributed boxes and ripped them open. They tore the cardboard. They forced nuggets into their mouths. Russell stuffed them in three-at-a-time.  “You’ll slow down,” went Brayden. “You’ll see.” The pledges didn’t respond. There were a lot of chewing noises. We sat. Were we really gonna watch these guys eat a bunch of nuggets? Were we supposed to like, enjoy this? Some live-action mukbang shit? One brother glanced at his phone. Another shifted in his seat. The pledges kept eating. At ten minutes, their pace was unchanged. Brayden paced around the room. “You’ll see,” he said.  Brayden scanned the room. There was no puke. There were no gagging pledges. There was a growing pile of empty boxes. His eyes flicked. The pledges had oil all over their chins, but they were smiling. Brayden’s grin vanished. “Wait,” he said, “Stop.” They did not stop. Maybe the appetite of starving eighteen-year-olds who hadn’t really been sneaking snacks was just too much to contain once unleashed. “Stop!” Brayden yelled. He squatted down to eye level with Russell. “If you don’t stop, you’ll be known as McPledge.” “Fucking tight,” went Russell, mid-chew, “That name is sick.” “You don’t want to be McPledge!” went Brayden. “Nah, dude, I kinda do,” said Russell. He grinned. Chicken showed between his teeth.  The pledges snickered. One raised a nugget into the dim basement light. “McPledge!” he yelled.  “McPledge!” went another. “McPledge!” They sounded off with mouths full, and hardly in unison, “McPledge! McPledge! McPledge!” Brayden clenched his fists. He stepped toward them. But then a voice came from the perimeter, “McPledge!” Brayden whirled and glared, but we had already started. It came from all sides now. “McPledge! McPledge! McPledge!” Brayden spun and spun, his eyes first piercing, then pleading, then down at the floor, and all of a sudden, we were laughing.  I was laughing. Jack Whaler is a writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His stories have appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Johnny America,  and 100-Foot Crow,  among others. He can be found on Twitter/X or Instagram at: @jack_whaler.

During my time producing a TV series years ago, I became far too familiar with a term I'd previously heard used only in passing:  stage mothers.  These were moms – and sometimes dads – who not only lived vicariously through their acting offspring, but worse, used them as a primary means of financial support. It was only after my first-born son fell in love with baseball that I learned there was a correlative of sorts:  baseball dads.  What they share with stage mothers and fathers is the vicarious thrill and the excessive focus, but with no immediate monetary payoff.  Instead the goal is aspirational:  that their future star will become a future Clayton Kershaw, Aaron Judge, or Shohei Ohtani, earning millions en route to the Hall of Fame.  These fathers – and occasionally mothers – spend countless hours not merely playing catch or pitching batting practice, but also scraping together the bucks for instructors, nutritionists, and gear.  In some cases that goes so far as to underwrite the costs of travel teams designed to showcase their kids as shortstop, centerfielder, or pitcher. Though I played high school baseball and attended an occasional game – the Yankees before I left the East Coast, the Dodgers when I came to LA – I'd assumed my kinship to the sport was largely ancient history. That began to change when Jonas, still in preschool, was recruited by the older kids to play wiffle ball and catch on our quiet street in the Hollywood Hills.  The love affair was cemented when my wife and I took him to his first Dodger game, then enriched even more when, in full Dodger gear, he won a Best Halloween Costume award at the local rec center. As he was about to start kindergarten, in search of a neighborhood with flat streets we moved to Santa Monica.  No surprise that when baseball season neared, I tried to sign Jonas up for t-ball.  To my dismay, I was told that because he was not yet 6, he'd have to wait a year.  “But he can hit pitching,” I stated, only to have the Little League president say, “I doubt that.” Undaunted, I found a park league eager to accept him.  There he exulted first in t-ball, then in what's known as 5-Pitch, where each team's coach does the pitching. When that season ended, Jonas wanted to move up to something more competitive:  real baseball.  Fortuitously, a friend told me about Fall Ball in the San Fernando Valley.  Though neighbors were stunned that I would make the trek “over the hill” early on Saturday mornings, the experience was great.  Above and beyond being able to hit live pitching – and take to the mound himself – he was thrilled to be among kids who prized baseball over video games and ski trips.  The irony is that after baseball, Jonas would change into his soccer uniform as we sped back to Santa Monica, then score a couple of goals while other kids complained about being hot, thirsty, or tired. Despite the joy from playing, there was something that made him self-conscious:  he was short for his age.  Recognizing his distress, I asked him which kid had the kind of height he'd like to have.  When he pointed toward a chubby kid named Joseph, I made him a promise.  “In a few years, you'll be able to use the top of his head as an armrest.”  That became a running joke between us until one day Jonas finally asked how and why I could say that.  Gesturing toward Joseph, who was standing nearby with his parents, I asked, “What do you notice about the dad?” “He's tiny.” “And the mom?” “Tinier.” “And what do you notice about Joseph?” “Tell me.” “He's got the beginning of a mustache, which means he's not going to grow much more.  Understand now?” Jonas nodded, still wishing he were taller. There are turning points in everyone's life.  For Jonas, an important one was going to the UCLA baseball camp.  Clearly he made an impression on the head coach, who invited him to be a guest bat boy for a game the following Spring.  What started as a one-time opportunity soon led to additional invitations, then an offer to do the job whenever there was no conflict with school or his own baseball schedule. Since we had no family on the west coast, in addition to providing exposure to baseball at a high level, it also meant the players became surrogate older cousins.  As a result, during school vacations, we would use the UCLA schedule as an excuse to travel to the Bay Area to see the team play against Stanford or Berkeley. Being the bat boy also allowed Jonas to make use of his other great love:  art.  Hesitantly at first, then with increasing zeal, he started drawing his choice as player of the game whenever UCLA won, with the results hanging on the clubhouse wall. Another turning point came when Manny Adams, the switch-hitting second baseman – and nephew of the head coach – approached me one day after a game.  “How would you feel,” he asked, “if I teach Jonas how to switch-hit?”   “If he's up for it,” I replied, “fine with me.” That turned out to be a benefit long before having to deal with curveballs or sliders.  Scheduled to play “up” on a tournament team with kids a year or two older, Jonas thought his chance was over when he broke his left arm playing basketball.  Stuck in a cast, he was stunned when his coach showed up unexpectedly at our house.  “If I can get a waiver,” he asked, “will you pitch and hit?”  Jonas, not surprisingly, turned to me.   “If the doctor says it's okay,” I stated, “it's fine with me.” That was trial by fire for Jonas batting left-handed, and he acquitted himself both hitting and pitching.  Thanks to the discovery of batting cages in Culver City before the area became gentrified, Jonas found himself among a new group of kindred spirits – kids for whom baseball was far more than a participation or seasonal sport.  It was there that he bonded with another young switch-hitter – Covelli Crisp – who was three grades ahead of him in school. When the owner of the cages, an ex-minor-leaguer named John Slack, initiated an invitation-only eight-week program for kids moving up to varsity in high school, an exception was made for Jonas, who was still in eighth grade. Each Sunday, John and a couple of his ballplayer pals put them through rigorous drills – fielding, hitting, bunting, running the bases, and stealing – dividing the focus between fundamentals and game situations.  Then they would finish with some baseball lore. The youngest, and easily the shortest, of those on the field, Jonas surprised me – and perhaps himself – by holding his own among guys, including his friend Covelli, who were high school studs. I, meanwhile, got my first serious taste of baseball dads and their chatter.  It was during those afternoons that I encountered what seemed almost like an obscure vocabulary:  scouts, showcases, Area Code games, hitting gurus, and the like.  For the most part, I kept to myself with one exception, a friendly guy named Loyce who was Covelli's dad. On week eight, instead of training, I got a look at a whole other universe when John's proteges played a double-header against a travel team composed of high-schoolers from Westchester, Inglewood, and Compton. Because pride was at stake, not merely for the guys who'd been training with John, but also for John himself, I hoped that Jonas would carry his weight.  He did more than that, getting a double batting lefty in game one, plus two singles from the right side in game two, as well as pitching a scoreless inning in relief. As the teams were shaking hands in the aftermath, I watched the opposing coach put his arm around Jonas, then walk with him toward me.  Introducing himself as Anthony Anderson, he allowed Jonas to speak. “He'd like me to join his travel team,” Jonas announced to me. “Okay if I ask what's involved?” “One, sometimes two, practices a week,” said Anthony. “And since we don't have enough fields to host a tournament, weekends away once in a while.” Having attended an urban high school, I had a happy sense of deja vu seeing Jonas become one of only two white kids on a predominantly Black team. Traveling to tournaments in towns like Fontana and Poway that had previously been only names on a map, I got an even greater sense of the hopes and dreams of the baseball dads, as well as the pressure faced by their sons. Every game, every at-bat, every stint on the mound was tantamount to do-or-die for many of them.  On top of that was the dissatisfaction if their kid was playing second base instead of shortstop, left field instead of center, or batting 8th or 9th instead of 3rd or 4th.  Or worse, sitting on the bench.  More troubling than the grumbling about coaching decisions that might impair their sons' futures, was the sense, never fully articulated, that it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if one of the anointed players sprained an ankle or developed arm trouble. But Jonas was having fun, and that's what mattered to me. That ended when problems with personalities and finances caused the team to implode. Fearing that his travel days were over, Jonas got a bail-out by a call from the coach of a team he'd played against.   “Dad,” he said after asking the coach to hold, “can I play for the Channel Island Mariners?” Taking the phone, I thanked the coach for the offer, but mentioned that while weekend games and tournaments weren't a problem, it would be next to impossible to get Jonas to practices in Ventura County. Happily, a solution was found.  Jonas would be on the honor system, promising to hit at the batting cage at least once a week, as well as throwing what's called a bullpen session by having me catch him at one of the local parks. This quickly became a different kind of experience.  First, the roster was almost entirely Latino, yielding friendships that carried on through high school and beyond.  Also, it was far better organized and funded, which made for a higher level of tournaments, including periodic trips to Las Vegas. But with the uptick came even more pressure from the baseball dads and moms.  That was true among the Mariners, but even more so among most of the teams that they faced, some with coaches who were paid significant amounts of money, which commensurately upped the expectations. Then came an offer for Jonas to join a team in a new Spring league.  With no geographical boundaries, and better competition than what was available locally, it sounded promising.  Again Jonas turned to me, since it wasn't only permission that was necessary, but also lots of driving.  That resulted in a conversation with John Torosian, the effusive coach who would have an impact first on my son's life, then later on mine. Entering high school in September, Jonas was asked to play with the varsity in a handful of Saturday games against non-conference opponents.  Since he was the only freshman, the head coach couldn't figure out how, instead of the juniors and seniors getting greetings and hugs from guys on other teams, it was Jonas, thanks to his time on the travel circuit. As those practice games were drawing to an end, Jonas got a phone call while we were having breakfast one Saturday.  Midway through the call he turned to me.  “Covelli wants me to try out for a team.” “Find out where and when,” I replied. Only after he hung up did I learn the “where” was Compton, and the “when” was the following Saturday. Having already agreed, I didn't say no. Thus began a long-term relationship with Compton Baseball Academy Training – CBATS – run by Gerald Pickens, who almost single-handedly kept youth baseball alive in that tough part of Los Angeles County.  In addition to being the only white kid on the team, Pickens, better known as G, later informed me that Jonas was the first white friend for most of the team members.  For them it was a new phenomenon culturally, but not as much as it was for Jonas, who got to experience the racism – sometimes couched, other times explicit – that the team faced when traveling to places where players like Unique Johnson, Marquis Jackson, Avante Rose, and even Covelli were presumed to be gangbangers. Travel they did, using grant money to play in a big tournament in Arizona, then an even more important one in Alaska.  To my son's surprise, I chose not to accompany the team to faraway places.  Because many of the kids were fatherless or had dads who couldn't afford to make such trips, I didn't want the only white kid to be different.  Nor did I want anyone to feel that Jonas was getting special treatment because of my presence.  Most importantly, I didn't want Jonas to have divided loyalties.  Without me, he could more easily be one of the guys. The period of calm we anticipated during the Christmas break vanished when Jonas got an emergency call from Covelli.  He was set to play in a tournament in San Diego for a team called Long Beach Breakers who, due to injuries and illness, found themselves short of manpower. On a roster filled with high school seniors, including two who went on to long careers in Major League baseball – Chase Utley plus Covelli, soon to be known as Coco Crisp – Jonas handled second base as the Breakers played six games in seven days against other future big leaguers including Horacio Ramirez (Braves) and Ryan Garko (Cleveland). At last came Jonas's first official high school season, from which three experiences stand out.  The first, as he was alone in the locker room, changing for practice, came when three Latino gang members burst in and started pushing him around until a metal bat was heard banging against a locker.  Turning, they saw an angry third baseman, Junior Barba, glaring menacingly.  “What the fuck you doing?” Junior demanded. “Messin' with the white motherfucker.” “Ain't no white motherfucker!” snarled Junior, who a few years later would be convicted of  murder.  “That's my teammate.  Mess with him, you mess with me!” The second happened during a rare televised game against El Segundo, then ranked #1 in the country.  With Santa Monica leading by a run, Jonas was moved from second base to the pitcher's mound to seal the victory.  He got the save, with the last out coming when he struck out a 1st team All-American, Alberto Concepcion, who would be drafted a month later by the San Diego Padres. The third came when Dan Kramer, a pitcher from Jonas's bat boy days at UCLA, arrived at a game against Torrance just in time to see Jonas hit his first high school home run.  That resulted in an invitation to be part of a select team Dan was assembling, all of whom went on to play college and/or pro ball, including Skip Schumaker, now the manager of the Texas Rangers. By the time his sophomore year was underway, two things had changed.  Thanks to travel ball, plus a growth spurt that meant he was no longer the shortest guy on the team, Jonas started receiving newfound attention.  First came profiles in both the LA Times Westside Section and the Santa Monica Evening Outlook.  Next, inquiries from college coaches.  Best of all was an invitation from Astros scout Doug Deutsch to play on his Fall Scout Team, on which he was assisted by a Twins scout named Bill Mele.  That meant 18 innings of high level wood bat baseball each Saturday by prospects who were occasionally joined by pros wanting an off-season workout. An even more unexpected surprise came my way thanks to Jonas' old coach John Torosian.  Away from youth baseball, he was a real estate investor transitioning into producing indie films.  His request was for me to look at a script he called a psychological thriller, which put me in an awkward spot since I didn't want to sully a relationship.   The moment I finished reading, the phone rang.  “So?” John asked. “Let me put it mildly,” I answered.  “It's neither psychological nor thrilling.” I heard John gulp.  “Since we've got a start date, any way to save it?” “First,” I offered, “make it about the dad whose daughter was killed years ago, not the killer.” “Okay.  And?” “Instead of a local cop, make the investigator a female FBI officer who shows up in town.” “Because?” “You've got a fish-out-of-water dynamic, plus a love interest.” “When can you start a rewrite?” Though I explained that I was midway through a largely autobiographical screenplay that I didn't want to abandon, John persisted.  “What'll it take to persuade you?” “I'll coin a phrase.  Let me direct.” “Why you?” “I'm presuming this is low budget.  If you get somebody who does this for a living, midway through shooting, he'll be worrying about his next payday.” “But you –?” “Will want it as a calling card.” To my dismay, I went from projects where I was only the writer, merely the writer, and sometimes no longer the writer to being the director.   Nor would this be the only time my involvement with youth baseball led to an unexpected change in my career. Fortunately, at a time when I was too busy rewriting, casting, and scouting locations for chauffeuring duties, Jonas was now old enough to drive.  Searching for a used car that would be fun as well as useful, we found a rebuilt '68 Camaro that tickled his fancy. Then came filming, which meant that I was busier than ever.The word I got from a couple of dads made it sound like while Doug Deutsch and Bill Mele were great, the intensity among many of the parents was at a level I hadn't yet witnessed.  Some of them jockeyed Doug and the opposing coaches, others tried to hobnob with scouts who showed up, and many handed out stat sheets. But Jonas, who played shortstop except for pitching an inning each weekend, seemed happy with the level of play and the camaraderie, which was all I cared about.  When scout ball ended, Jonas rejoined the Channel Island Mariners for a holiday tournament, then took a breather before the high school season. Unbeknownst to his mom and me, more and more of his time was devoted to art, but of a different sort. Surreptitiously, he'd moved into the world of graffiti – which we later learned meant numerous narrow escapes from the law.  Years later, his mother still finds herself wondering if one day the FBI will knock on our door. One evening when we were out for tacos, Jonas turned to me with a smile.  “Know what?  You were right,” he stated. “About?” “Remember the kid I wished I was as big as?” He pointed at Joseph, from soccer years before, who was entering the restaurant with his parents. “Yeah?” I replied. “I probably could use the top of his head as an armrest.” I did my best to schedule post-production on the thriller so that I could attend as many of  Jonas' high school games as possible. While the stands often had parents chirping about their sons' lack of playing time, I quietly wished for the opposite.  Expected to go the distance on the mound on Tuesdays, then play shortstop on Thursdays and Saturdays, part of me wished that Jonas could occasionally save his arm by being the designated hitter. But since he was the guy, that wasn't meant to be. Because he was roped in by his English teacher into working on the school paper, the passive voice was used more often than not in his accounts of the ball games.  Not allowed to mention his own name, articles tended to report that “A one-hitter was pitched,” or “A home run was hit,” without mentioning by whom. That was more than compensated for by the presence of scouts and college recruiters at many of his games, both home and away. But a game at Torrance High left me troubled.  With Santa Monica leading 2-0, their defense fell apart in what should have been the 7th and final inning.  A routine ground ball to the second baseman was booted.  Next the kind of fly ball known as a “can of corn” was misplayed by the centerfielder.  Then a passed ball by the catcher allowed both runners to advance.  Followed by the sort of dribbler called a “swinging bunt” that allowed the lead runner to score, and the other to reach third.  Finally, a sacrifice fly, and the game was tied. I cringed as I saw the coach approach Jonas, clearly asking if he could keep pitching.  Since he considered himself a gamer, Jonas took the mound in the 8th inning, then the 9th, and again in the 10th after Santa Monica took the lead. That pitchers are only allowed to throw a maximum of ten innings per week does not mean it's wise or healthy to do so in one game, which ups the pitch count significantly. Though I didn't know it then, Jonas would ultimately have to deal with the consequences. The summer before senior year proved to be a whirlwind.  In addition to playing in a Connie Mack league where he was the only member of a team called the Thunder who hadn't played college ball, Jonas had two invitational wood bat showcases looming. First came the Area Code Games, in which every team was sponsored by a Major League team, with Jonas playing for the home town Dodgers, coached by a scout named Artie Harris. Compared to what I'd witnessed before, this was baseball dads on steroids.  With the stands packed with scouts and their superiors – area supervisors, cross-checkers, even members of front offices – plus college coaches galore, and numerous agents, everything was of a different order of magnitude. Dads – and moms – buzzed around, handing out stat sheets, cozying up to everyone of importance they could find, and praying for a great performance from their would-be star. On the Dodgers, Jonas had a rare distinction – the only one who got to play a position, hit, and pitch. To his surprise, he was also approached by younger kids wanting his autograph. Whereas the Area Code games were held at a college ballpark – the home of Cal State Long Beach – Team One upped the ante even higher.  Held at the Miami Marlins stadium, it carried the notion of showcase – and the baseball dad syndrome – to heights I never dreamed possible.  Hoping to adjust to the three-hour time change and the humidity, Jonas and I flew in a couple of days early, spending time at the beach, then at a Marlins game. Also, so as not to be completely overwhelmed by the circus-like atmosphere, we stayed at a hotel far enough to have an escape valve. That proved to be a wise move, enabling us to catch our breath at night. Fall meant more scout ball for the Astros, followed by another holiday tournament. By the time spring practice for the high school season began, the kid who'd been self-conscious about his height stood 6'3”, making him the tallest player on the team. The season flew by in record time.  But despite the highlights, which included Jonas pitching a no-hitter in a Spring tournament where he was named MVP, I was concerned.  In games when he was pitching, I often saw him surreptitiously rotating his shoulder, which seemed to be tightening up.  But when asked, Jonas denied any problem. That was especially not broached with scouts or with college coaches. As his high school career was coming to an end, there were two key questions.  First, was Jonas a switch-hitter who could pitch, or a pitcher who could switch-hit for power?  Second, college or pro ball? Years as the UCLA bat boy, where Jonas experienced all the fun both on and off the field – including two trips to Hawaii – made college life hard to pass up.  That was reinforced on his recruiting trips.  In contrast was what he heard from friends who spent time in the lower rungs of the minor leagues, which sounded punishing:  long bus trips, a dog-eat-dog environment, and rudimentary living situations. College became his choice. With Jonas headed to the East Coast, I assumed I was due for a period of baseball withdrawal.  That was soon compounded by a Hollywood strike that brought scripted production to a halt. As luck would have it, a producer I knew asked if I had something that could get us into production legally.  “How about a documentary?” I responded. “About?” Suddenly an idea popped into my head.  “The Latinization of baseball,” I blurted.  “On the field and in the stands.” “How much?” he asked. “How much you got?” I joked, figuring the cost would depend upon the size of the crew, plus the amount of travel. It was only because of scouts I'd gotten to know thanks to Jonas that I was able to enter the largely hermetically sealed world of baseball.  Artie Harris opened the door not merely with key Dodgers execs and players, but also to their pioneering academy in the Dominican Republic.  Doug Deutsch paved the way with the Astros, both in Houston and at their academy in Venezuela.  Bill Mele facilitated my welcome by the Twins.  From there the opportunities grew exponentially. Together with a cinematographer and sound man, off I went to Cuba, the Dominican, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico, then Spring Training in Arizona, which I assumed would be the end of my travels. That changed when Orlando Cepeda, whom I interviewed thanks to a scout for the Giants, insisted I come to Cooperstown.  He and Juan Marichal were my wranglers for people like Sparky Anderson, Gaylord Perry, and Tony Perez, who were in town for the Hall of Fame inductions. By the time I got to see Jonas play college baseball, he had reinvented himself as a sidearmer.  Though he claimed that changing his delivery made him more effective, I sensed that it owed to the arm trouble I'd feared during his senior year of high school. Sadly, my suspicions proved to be true.  Though Jonas had success both pitching and hitting, inevitably something snapped.  After surgery to repair his torn labrum and rotator cuff, Jonas went through painful rehabilitation, with scouts calling every so often to check on his progress. Then came the slow process of regaining arm strength, followed by a workout in front of several scouts. Despite throwing well that day, Jonas realized that his future would not be in baseball due to the pain that ensued. While painful for me to see his dream end, it was infinitely tougher for Jonas.  Fortunately, baseball was not his only love. Taking a job as a bartender while trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life, he spent time non-working hours painting canvases, which led one of his paintings being selected for a group art show. When the show ended, the gallery owner returned the painting to Jonas at the bar where he was working.  There, it was spotted by a regular who was intrigued. “Want to try doing a mural?” he asked upon learning that Jonas was the artist.  That's how Jonas painted a wall at the Floyd's Barber Shop in West Los Angeles, which turned into commissions at Floyd's around California and as far away as Denver and Lexington, Kentucky. To mark the passing of SportsCenter's Stuart Scott, Jonas painted a tribute near the Los Angeles Airport, which quickly went viral, leading it to be seen at the ESPY's that year. That led to his iconic “Touch Of Venice” on the street where Orson Welles filmed the astonishing opening sequence of “Touch Of Evil.” Best of all, art led Jonas back into the world of sports.  He was the muralist commissioned by the Dodgers to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's Major League debut, and is now the go-to guy for the Dodgers, Lakers, Kings, Chargers, and the LAFC, as well as the Tiger Woods-Genesis Golf Tournament. As a baseball dad who now focuses on documentaries, I couldn't be happier. Alan Swyer is an award-winning filmmaker whose recent documentaries have dealt with Eastern spirituality in the Western world, the criminal justice system, diabetes, boxing, and singer Billy Vera. In the realm of music, among his productions is an album of Ray Charles love songs. His novel 'The Beard' was recently published by Harvard Square Editions.  His newest film is "When Houston Had The Blues."

Seeing the  Station Closed. No Entry  sign put me in a sour mood. The 125th St. station was literally right across from my office, and beyond convenient. I’m normally not one to complain, but with late-night sub-freezing temperatures, I just had no interest in weaving through aimless pedestrians to the 116th St. station. Unfortunately, the alternatives appealed to me even less. I’ve gotten one too many bad reviews on Uber, and they cost way more than I’m willing to spend on a commute. Buses are almost always mired by traffic, and almost every driver I’ve ever encountered was certifiable. The subway, for all its issues, is the most predictable, cheap and consistent in speed. Once I board a car, I can just check out and wait to arrive. Having been too busy to respond sooner, I replied to a text from my girlfriend that I was finally on my way home, and then hugged my coat around myself in a meaningless effort to keep warm before starting off in the direction of 116th Street. The hour was later than expected. She would be mad, but I had no other choice. My legal team had received a massive contract, and found several major discrepancies the other party had either missed or willfully neglected. I’m used to 60+ hour work weeks and well-paid for it, but after the tedium of re-reviewing the entire document with a fine-toothed comb, I wanted nothing more than to go underground and let the train transport me.  Something about being underground has always appealed to me. Barreling through the tunnels and peering into the endless dark always put me in mind of my History and Anthropology studies – the Ancient Greeks’ conception of Hades, to be specific. Most movies depict the Greek underworld as a hellscape, as if Zeus equals God and Hades equals Satan. but if you read the academic literature on the subject, it was a totally different interpretation of the hereafter. Everyone crossed over to Hades after death, regardless of who they were. Judgment was someone else’s job. I likely could have had a career in history or anthropology, but there was a recession on when I graduated, and my loans were through the roof, so a postgraduate law degree it was.  I checked my phone just as a gust of wind belted me in the face, forcing my chilled frown into a grimace. No response from Min to my previous text. A fragment of a recent argument flickered through my memory, but I blocked it out, shoving the device back into my pocket with more force than intended. I reached the stairs of the 116th St. station, and descended, leaving the cacophony of traffic and humanity behind me, trying to push the thoughts of my girlfriend away. I had about ten minutes before the next car came in, and from what I could see, the station was empty. This was a bit of a surprise, but it suited me fine. An invariable aspect of public transit is always feeling like I need to shower whenever I’ve used it. Call me misanthropic, but I’ve seen the numbers. As a general rule, most people in the city are dirty. I had been waiting at the station for about five minutes when I realized I wasn’t actually alone. A gaunt, balding, white man stood far to my left, leaning over a derelict on the floor, slouching against the wall. He dressed in gray and had circular wire-framed glasses with a body and demeanor so frail, I probably wouldn’t have noticed him at all if he hadn’t been stooping over the derelict. Unable to look away or contain my curiosity, I directed my eyes to his feet. He had placed a brown leather briefcase on the floor, and had it opened toward himself in such a way that I could not see the contents. I assumed they were conducting some kind of illegal business when, in one swift movement, he plunged his hand into the derelict’s chest and, after feeling around a bit, extracted a small ball of pulsing white light. He then set the ball down in his briefcase, and closed it.  I realized I was staring when the man in the suit picked up his briefcase and walked toward me. I quickly turned away and looked toward the wall across the tracks.  The man continued his approach until he stood only a few feet away. “Excuse me, do you know if this line goes to Queens?” he asked in a sort of mellifluous English accent. “Uh, no,” I said, without really thinking about his question, “I think you need to get off at 42nd Street and switch lines.” He nodded curtly, as though he didn’t care either way. I suppose I could have given him better directions than that. Queens wasn’t part of my route and my mind was too preoccupied to think critically about where he wanted to go. Without being too blatant, I glanced over at the derelict. He hadn’t moved since I’d last looked at him, and he appeared to have stopped breathing. “Did you—What did you just do to that guy?” “He died,” the man said simply. I didn’t know what to say. I had hardly believed my eyes, but I knew what I saw. The man had pulled a ball of light about the size of his fist from the derelict’s chest, and put it in his briefcase. No blood. No incision. It was as if the dead man had faded from existence. “He died?” I asked. The man nodded to me, “Should we, like, let someone know?” “It’s already been called in. I got here early.” “Right. And that thing was his…” I gestured to his briefcase, trailing off at a loss for words. He looked at me plainly, his face carrying the dispassionate expression of an overqualified craftsman, used to fielding the same questions about his profession day in and day out. “His life,” he said to me. “Always a bit of a shock seeing it, I know, but we’re not allowed to display souls for the purpose of advertising,” I should have left right then and there—just taken the Uber, but the thought of my low customer rating coupled with my curiosity kept me from doing so. The carefree manner in which this man had walked away from the dead vagrant was somehow both vulgar and thrilling, and I found myself drawn to his confidence. The train pulled into the station, and we both got on board. “I’m sorry, so… you stole his life ?” I whispered.  “Oh no, I just collected  it,” he sighed as if this should be obvious. “He’s dead.”  On the surface alone, there were several dozen ontological questions floating around my mind concerning the nature of life outside a physical body and how or why they manifested as balls of light, but I was too consumed with other questions to waste time on these.  “So… does that make you Death?” I asked, following him as he made his way to a seat. “Hm… well, after a fashion, I suppose,” He said, nodding.  Far away from scythes, cloaks and skeletal specters on Swedish shores, this man had all the sterilized vapidity of an auditor in his mid-to-late forties. Still, the prospect that he might actually be Death made me nervous. Why else would I see Death, unless it was my time?  Up until this point, I had suspected that he was playing some kind of bizarre joke on me, but I couldn’t figure out why he would have chosen me as the sole recipient of something so clearly elaborate, particularly when he seemed to treat me with such disinterest. It had occurred to me that he could have been an impressive street magician, but there again, I felt like they typically performed for audiences larger than a single man on the subway. A third option was that the man was just off his rocker. He certainly wouldn’t be the only one in New York, but something about him seemed totally genuine and sane. On top of that, there was the issue of the glowing fistful of light he pulled from the derelict’s chest and put in his briefcase. It was so far beyond convincing, I couldn’t help but take it at face value. We sat down next to each other, and he set his briefcase on his lap. I noticed that the combination locks were jumbled. No chance that I could get in there to take a closer look , I surmised. “What did you mean by that exactly?” I asked, as the doors closed, and the car kicked to life. “I’m sorry?” He asked me. “You said, ‘After a fashion.’” I repeated, “Like, are you Death or not?” He paused to collect his thoughts. I felt good knowing that I could pose such a hard question for Death to answer. I felt that if I were alive during medieval times, my ability to outsmart Death would have branded me as a sort of dark-horse traveler. Unfortunately, the role of dark-horse traveler in modern society was impossible to maintain financially unless you were independently wealthy or a vagrant. “The thing is,” he said to me, “That’s rather a misconception that a lot of people have. I’m only one of many employees, and we’re not just ‘Death’ per se.” “Uh… come again?” I asked. He spoke so fast, I missed the majority of what he said. I felt the advantage of my intelligence slipping away. I had to reconnoiter.  “Well, first of all,” he began, struggling to find the words, “There’s not just one ‘Death’ responsible for closing lives out. I work with many agents—thousands really. Which makes sense. I mean, how else could we be in so many different places at once? You might as well believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy—and they’re endlessly more plausible than the notion of a single Grim Reaper or an Angel of Death.” “They are?” I asked. “The number of teeth lost in a day, and presents given on a single night are far exceeded by the number of deaths that occur in a 24-hour period,” He said to me. I saw his point. I could feel my advantage growing again. If he was going to try to take my life, he wasn’t going to get it without a fight. I was a fairly successful lawyer and I wasn’t about to just take death lying down like that derelict. “So how do you become an Angel of Death– or are you a subcontractor or something?” I asked. He sighed and rubbed his eyes. Up close, I could see bags under his eyes and graying stubble that hid in plain sight from a distance. It occurred to me that like myself, the man had been pulling long hours.  “Well again, we’re not so much angels as we are agents ...” he said.  “So you’re an agent  of Death?” “Uh, no. Death collection is just one of our responsibilities…” He muttered, “Let’s see, I suppose I went about this backwards…” He paused to collect himself and held up a brittle hand to clarify. Taking out his wallet, he fished in one of the pockets, extracted a small card and handed it to me. A QR code sat at the top next to a large harp logo, under which minimal text read from top to bottom:   Arlington Hough Account Manager Life Ltd. “I’m an account manager for Life Ltd. I, like many others, manage both lives and  deaths,” he explained. I detected a small shadow of forgotten pride, but paid it little attention. A vague everyday memory clicked into place next to what he was showing me. Somewhere in the back of my memory the name Life Ltd. floated around with terms like death collection and EOL scores, but I had never given them much consideration before. “Life Ltd,” I read aloud, “Are you the ones with the commercials with all those black and white vistas?” Arlington nodded, “‘ We’re ready for you, so you can be ready for what comes next ,’” he intoned before rolling his eyes and shaking his head, “Awful slogan.” “Right,” I said, “I always thought you guys were a life insurance company.”  “You wouldn’t be alone. It’s an industry-wide problem if I’m honest.” “Interesting. And as an account manager, you manage death and life?” I asked. He directed his eyes upward to think.  “Uh… As I said, most people have it all wrong,” he paused, “Each life is an account we’re assigned to manage. An agent is assigned to new lives every day. One of us comes in, opens up the account, and that’s the beginning of the new life. Most lives are grandfathered into policies. If your parents were with Life Ltd, chances are you are too. The same would go if they were with Karmic, RM&A or Spritus. And it’s not just human life either. Life Ltd. has a range of departments, each of which covers different kingdoms or genuses depending on the complexity of the demographic. In the case of myself, I’m in the Primate Department on the negative fifth floor of the New York Branch. But all plantlife falls under a single department on the negative second. And then felines and canines fall under their own departments, on the negative 21st and 22nd, respectively.”   I wasn’t sure what to say, but I was following him, save for the quivering feeling inside me that the very fabric of reality was shifting. “In any case,” he continued, “once accounts are opened, lives pretty much take care of themselves. We’re seldom involved in the general goings on of existence. We basically just keep track of your credit rating, and collect your life upon your time of death. Upon your EOL– or end of a life– whenever that time comes, we close down your life account, and a record of it is stored in a filing cabinet in the sub-basement to be used for reference if need be.” The subway car stopped. I half considered getting off here and just walking the rest of the way home. What this guy was telling me was not the most pleasant news. I thought about the various dramas playing out in my own life, and wondered what the point of it all was if I was just going to be stuck in a filing cabinet after I die. A sudden loneliness came over me. I was well into my twenties. How had I managed to miss this? Was this something everyone else was aware of? I thought about Min and our meager single-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. How would I explain this to her when I got home tonight? I checked my phone again. Still no response. Over the course of the last few months, radio silence on her end had become more and more the norm whenever I worked late. The sex had been getting worse as well and I half suspected her of cheating on me with one of the other editors at the Lightning Rod office. That was the online publication she wrote for. They covered up-and-coming bands throughout the indie music scene, and billed themselves as trendy, hip, and underground. Their Brooklyn office was in a basement with a lot of interior brick, mannequins in vintage clothing, and a kitchenette to help distract from their leaky drop ceiling. They’d been in operation for over ten years and offered the cultural capital associated with writing about more alternative music than Rolling Stone, but in a way that was “more accessible” than Pitchfork.  Really, it was just another place that traded in cultural capital, which is all most publications sell. In some ways, I’ve always envied this. Cultural capital is possibly one of the greatest inventions of modern capitalism. You hardly have to put any work into having it, and it can afford you all kinds of social accolades. On top of that, if you can write well enough, you can convince people you actually know what you're talking about enough to sell words to them. It's an amazing system. The editor Min was salivating over– a guy named Barri (yes, with an “i”) – was a king of cultural capital. I only met him once at a release party she dragged me to, but since we spent the entire evening in his company, I got a pretty good measure of him. He was essentially just a walking, breathing version of their office mannequins, with thoughts and opinions gleaned from a cursory skimming of about a year’s worth of articles on Substack. Not that she noticed. She doted on his every pontification, laughed at all his terrible jokes and melted into a puddle without him having to lift a finger.  As the subway car pressed onward, I envisioned how a mild flirtation might be turning into intercourse at this very minute. His crotch accidentally-on-purpose grinding her bony waist after a few drinks at the bar, followed shortly by their absconding to his apartment, where she would fling off his thick-framed 80’s glasses, unbutton his tight, sweat-enameled flannel shirt, and rub his greasy femme hair, while they scrubbed each other’s faces with their tongues. Were they ahead of the curve? Did they already know about companies like Life Ltd? Or were they too up their own asses to care? In asking myself this, I realized how I might turn this chance meeting with Arlington Hough to my advantage. The one thing stronger than cultural capital—the one thing that can afford you almost anything you want in life is a solid network. I now knew someone who was possibly more powerful than anyone else in my network. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to have Barri killed, let alone my girlfriend, but having a contact that sat in an office that traded life and death could possibly bring certain privileges.  I looked at him again. Up to this point, his tone had wavered between that of an overworked cynic who had all but given up, and a middle manager whose ambition hinged solely on an ingrained corporate mandate to sell whenever the opportunity presented itself. How would he respond to my offer? A few people boarded the car, the doors shut, and we were moving again.  “Well, I work at a corporate law firm, and have a pretty extensive network,” I said, lowering my voice, “maybe we can give each other some business?” “Oh… Unfortunately it doesn’t really work like that.” He groaned, “There’s rather a lot of paperwork you have to go through before EOL can be declared. You have to sign off on various statements to confirm it is the correct  time to close the account, and then you have to sit hours in Circumstance Division’s office just to verify with your supervisor that circumstances are present for you to close the account. If you don’t keep up, you’ll fall behind, and once that happens, you're fired and liable for any credit lost. They don’t waste time with you. If you can’t handle the job, they don’t care.” He sighed, took his glasses off, and again rubbed the bridge of his nose.  “That’s all life is really about when you get down to it: credit,” he continued, returning the glasses to his face. “Once you have cleared circumstance checks, you have to establish a clear credit history. Then you have to verify  the credit history. And believe me, if you think they won’t catch you for a lack of due diligence in verifying a life’s credit, then you are wrong. They will catch you—especially if you close prematurely. The thing is, the company can lose millions  if only a few agents jump the gun. Then, beyond that,  there’s still the role of interest fluctuations, securities, in securities, physical fitness, etcetera, etcetera, all of which have to be filed to establish the correct credit level which itself must happen before you can file an account away. The value of a life, er—your credit, can change quite rapidly in a very short amount of time, especially toward the end, since that’s when people really start thinking about their afterlife.”  “Wait, what about  the afterlife?” I asked. “Oh, well, that’s really most of what our ads are referring to: ensuring you can choose the best afterlife for yourself,” He said, an inquiring look on his brow. “Many people stick with the afterlife their parents went with simply because it’s what’s in front of them and easy, but you absolutely have a choice, unless of course your credit plummets, in which case your place is most certainly not guaranteed.”  He sat up again a bit straighter and forced his intonation to shift to one of sales, “For instance, personally, I am sponsored by the First National Purgatory of America, but that in no way locks in any of my accounts with First National. After your account is closed, the choice is still completely up to you. That said, what I can  do is tell you about the many advantages of going with First National and recommend several good policies to you through their office. “After the whole Bordwell v Greener Pastures  decision of ‘53, life management firms were barred from coordinating directly with afterlives without making customers aware of alternatives,” he added, his cynical inflection returning, “However, I can say that generally speaking, First National Purgatory of America can guarantee you a spot of space in their afterlife that is both stately and affordable.” “Wasn’t purgatory disbanded around 2007 or 8?” I asked him, recalling a news story I’d heard at the time. “Oh, you're thinking of the famous non-discrimination case. First Catholic Purgatory Holdings got slapped with a non-discrimination lawsuit over an admittance policy that had, up until that point, barred the unbaptized from their various subsidiary purgatories.” “What happened?” “Well, as I just said, First Catholic lost.” He said, “Hardly surprising, really. They had the market cornered in post-life dwelling and when you sit at the top for so long, it's only a matter of time until you fall. And of course fall they did. Two years after the court decision, they split up into five smaller purgatories.” He brightened up, “Great news for the small afterlife though.” “So, can I start looking at afterlives now?” I asked. “Absolutely,” he said emphatically, “In fact, I recommend it. So many people wait until the last minute to start looking at afterlives. They get fooled by cheap marketing schemes, make rushed decisions, and end up paying way more for an afterlife with little value. If you plan ahead, you can make much more rational decisions, and reserve yourself a nice place in an afterlife.” “What about Heaven?” I asked. “You mean Heaven Multinational?” he inclined his head. “I guess?” “If you're asking about getting in, well, let’s just say I wouldn’t get my hopes up. With the market like it is right now, and with Heaven in such high demand among Christians and agnostic generalists as the afterlife of their choosing, prices have gone from high to astronomical,” He said with a note of unease. “How many credits do you have?” “Well, I don’t know,” I said. My mind was suddenly racing to figure this out. If this were what lay beyond, I’d need to know how to get into the best afterlife. I began to feel flushed around my collar as various questions about afterlives consumed me. Who offered the best afterlife for the best value? How would I know where to start looking? What if I found an afterlife I liked, but it had no vacancy? Were other people getting into better afterlives ahead of me? I envisioned some lucky bastard who hardly worked a day in his life getting into a nice space of afterlife just because got in when the market was ripe. “I would recommend getting in touch with your life account management agent,” Arlington said, “He manages your account. He’ll know how much your life is worth.” “ You  don’t know?” I asked hopefully. “I’d have to see your account file.” “Can’t you just… divine  how good I am?” I asked. “Like… Isn’t that a job perk of being a life account manager?” It seemed perfectly logical. How did he know what to put in his paperwork when he closed an account? The car stopped again, and a few more people got on. I noticed that Arlington didn’t move. There were only a few more stops before 42nd Street. If he was planning on getting off at that stop, I would need to get the information I needed out of him fast.  “I,   personally, could not,” he said, “Even assuming you’re with us and not one of our competitors, I would need to obtain authorization from the agent assigned to you— who usually works out of the office that opened up your account at birth. That’s an old regulation.” “How can I tell which account provider I’m with?” I asked. “It should be on the back of your driver’s license.” He said. I quickly fished my license out of my wallet, and with a wave of relief found a logo on the back that matched the business card Arlington Hough had given me. Without saying anything, I held it up to show him. “Ah, well, that should certainly make a credit check easier.” He said, “Are you from the city, originally?” “No, I was born in Scranton,” I said. His face contracted. “Oh dear…” he said. “Is that bad?” I asked. “Scranton is one of our worst franchises.” “You mean, all your offices don’t offer the same service?”  “Well, ultimately, yes, we do,” he noted, “but the quality of that service depends on which franchise holds your account.” “And the Scranton Office is bad?” “As bad as our Guiyang office, I’m afraid. We hear about them all the time at meetings.” “Why don’t you guys offer the same service to everyone?” I objected. “We do ,” he said a bit defensively, “but keeping the franchises in competition with one another increases profitability, and keeps regulators off our backs. Just be glad you're not with RM&A.” “Who?”  “Rhadamanthys, Minos and Aiakos,” he said, shaking his head, “Imagine Aspen Dental were a life management firm...”  “Sure,” I said, urgently shifting the subject back to my present situation, “But so, if my account’s still in Scranton, can I transfer?” “It’s rather time-consuming, but yes,” he lamented, “If you get in touch with one of our agents at the New York Office, he can begin the necessary paperwork, do some internal background checking, and get back to you, usually, within the month. Though whether or not you can transfer also depends on your credit rating.” “What do they need to confirm it for? As long as they have my file, can’t  any of the agents in the New York office tell how good I am?” “Well, no,” he said wincing, “and unfortunately it’s not just about how ‘good’ you are. I mean, how good you are does factor into your credit rating slightly, but only insofar that being bad adversely affects it.” “I just want to make sure I get into a good afterlife,” I said, hoping sincerity would get him to help me out. Arlington pinned me down with his stare and took a small breath. “Right. Listen,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but account management firms make almost all our money through service and transfer fees, so it’s really all the same to me: Afterlives make out like they’re run by a merry band of angelic do-gooders. They are not. Most afterlives– particularly the so-called ‘good’ ones– are run by feral rat-bastards who will over-inflate the cost of an afterlife, squeeze you for all your worth and then avoid delivering half the accommodations they promised once you’ve moved in.” “For real?” “Absolutely. As I said, the really nice ones have become quite costly over the last few decades,” he said, “Heaven Multinational, Islamic Paradise United, Greener Pastures. The economic landscape has had a severe impact on the number of people able to get into all of them. And I’ve heard especially mixed reviews about HM’s neighborhoods. The properties seem nice enough, but what often ends up happening is that people pour all their credits into getting in, only to discover they have neighbors they don’t like. Radical Evangelicals living next to Unitarians. Jehovah’s Witnesses living next to Catholics. Rivalries have happened, and they can turn quite ugly.” I thought about this for a moment, as we came to a stop again. He brought up another good point. What if I got stuck with neighbors I didn’t like? I’d already spent years living out of my parents’ house with nasty neighbors that either vehemently forbade you to touch their lawn, or were constantly in competition with you over something. Not only would I have to avoid getting ripped off by one of these guys, I’d have to find a section of an afterlife that didn’t have assholes in it, too.  The car lurched forward again, and we sped onward. 42nd Street was next.   “But yes,” he went on, sitting up in preparation to exit the car, “I would recommend checking out some of the various purgatories or limbos. They’re not half bad.” He paused and reached into his pocket, “You should really get in touch with an agent at the New York office. He can determine how much you're worth. Between your net assets, calorie intake, emotional stability, your total consumption rate, overall maturity, etcetera, etcetera, he’ll be able to tell you what your worth now, and recommend a strategy for future credit growth.” He began writing something on another business card that he extracted from his wallet. I tried to see without being too obvious. “Hopefully he’ll also be able to get you transferred out of Scranton.” He handed me the card. “Here’s the address for our New York Office.” “Oh, okay. Great,” I said. I felt like I was gaining an upper hand again. If I was lucky, I might even be able to reserve a spot ahead of time. “Which contact method is best? Phone or website?” “The website’s chatbot function works, but its responses are limited and it won’t be able to retrieve credit reports. It will eventually reroute you to a contact form, but those are known to take days to process,” he lamented, “Calling our 1-800 number works, but it is frequently bogged down, usually because of people calling in to ask the most idiotic questions. As a third alternative, you may just want to schedule an appointment in person at your nearest convenience. It gets quite busy though, so I recommend you plan in advance.” The subway car stopped at 42nd Street. Arlington Hough stood up to leave. I think he said something to me like, “This is my stop,” but I don’t remember. I was too wrapped in thought, but before he got off, I realized I had one more thing to ask him.  “Wait a second,” I asked, running to catch him at the door, “When is the office open?” “Oh… 24/7,” he said plainly. Then he cocked his head, tipped an imaginary hat. “Death takes no holiday, mind you…”  With that, he left the car. The doors closed, and I was left alone to wait impatiently until the train reached its next stop. When the doors finally swung open again, I rushed out with more zeal and excitement than I’d felt in ages. I texted my girlfriend to let her know something had come up and I was going to be even later than expected, and was unsurprised to see she still had yet to respond to my first text.  Whatever. We’ll see who’s laughing when she sees the kind of afterlife I’ve landed. Forget killing Barri. Defying old lovers and cheating bastards by transcending their success was the sweetest revenge.  I decided to suck it up and called an Uber to the office Arlington Hough directed me to. While inside the vehicle, I took some time to think and I began to piece together exactly how I would attack this whole thing. The truth of it was I wanted to guarantee a place in a good afterlife, but ending it all would undoubtedly impact my credit, and dying prematurely might mean missing out on additional accruals. I’d been fairly successful so far, so it seemed reasonable to assume a credit increase was likely to happen. I would need to mature like fine wine. At the same time, I was well aware of the competition I faced against people who would die before me. I kept thinking of that homeless person getting into a neighborhood in the afterlife I wanted ahead of me simply because he died earlier that day and got in while prices were down.  The Uber arrived at the address Arlington listed, and sped off shortly after I got out. The building was large with a gleaming green logo and dim interior with matching light. Invigorated, I thrust open the door and strode into a vacant lobby with a single receptionist. It was massive, with a high drop ceiling and white, painted concrete floor that reflected the light of another glowing logo that hung over the receptionist’s desk. Every step I took echoed around the room, but the attendant did not acknowledge me until I stood over her. She was very dark-complexioned and youthful—practically looked 16, and wore an all-black fitted suit over a white shirt. “I’m here for a walk-in, please?” She looked up at me from her computer, and cocked her head to the side with a vague wince that bordered on melancholy ennui. After looking me up and down, she nodded wordlessly and shoved a form in front of me to fill out.  “Have a seat and fill this out, please,” she said with a rushed, deadpan voice. I got the impression she didn’t like her job or walk-ins.   The form started with the usual stuff: my name, date of birth, Social Security number, but following that, it began asking me for a whole slew of other information including but not limited to the last time I had had sexual intercourse, my reading interests, willingness to contribute a urine and hair samples, my major regrets in life, and whether I thought I still had time to rectify them. It took me about thirty minutes, but in that time, no new walk-ins had entered, and I started to feel like I’d picked the best time of the day to come to their office.  I finished the paperwork and slid it toward the receptionist. With another pained expression and a sigh, she rolled it up and put it in a pneumatic tube system. I watched as it was sucked away to who knows where. She then handed me a ticket with the number 200343 on it. “Walk to the end of the hall, until you get to the elevator,” she said with a stiff nod to the nearby hallway, “take it down to level -3. You’ll wait there until your number is called,” I forced a smile and headed off in the direction she indicated.  Yeesh… I thought. I realized it was late, but it seemed to me Life Ltd. could really stand to hire a receptionist with better people skills. Wondering briefly whether there would be a customer satisfaction survey after this whole thing was done, I put her out of my mind as I entered the elevator and eyed the buttons for the various floors. All negatives, they stretched as far as -47, beneath which was a single button labeled with the abbreviation Sub . Subduing my curiosity, I pressed the -3 button and descended.  When I reached my floor, I was immediately greeted by another waiting room, only this one was vast, and packed with at least a hundred people. Dismayed, I checked over my shoulder to see if I’d gotten off at the wrong floor. I hadn’t. Signage declaring this floor the Homosapien department was unmistakable. I swerved around again. Modest, and sterile-looking chairs ran in rows all the way to the other end of the room, breaking only occasionally for the odd structural column. At the far side of the room were a set of doors and an enclosed reception window. I continued standing in mild bewilderment until the elevator doors slammed shut behind me, causing several bowed and waiting heads to steal sideways glances at me. I took several urgent steps forward, scanning for an empty chair, but careful not to disturb the delicate atmosphere of silence.  There is something primal about the modern waiting room. Entering one always seems to have a kind of gladiatorial quality, with various patrons sizing up new entrants first with a vague curiosity about where they fit vis-à-vis the established hierarchy of service providers and consumers, but that quickly gives way to veiled hostility. A new person always held the potential of upsetting the balance of time already spent waiting or worse: extending it. In a waiting room this size, that feeling was increased tenfold. After a few more sideways glances from restless clientele, the majority of them looked back down in near synchronicity to return to their cell phones or magazines, as if they were only mildly interested in me in the first place. Maybe they even convinced themselves this was the case, but for that second and a half, they were scared and suspicious. After weaving my way along a row of chairs I finally found a seat next to a large black woman and a glowering white guy with a scar down his cheek. His overall demeanor was unsavory, but I didn’t feel like spending another five minutes looking for a seat. I took out my phone and scrolled through social media until my device ran headlong into a wall of weak underground internet.  I glanced around the room looking for a guest wifi, but found none. A notable absence of magazines had me wondering how often people were called. I thought again about whether there would be a customer satisfaction survey when this was all over.  After a small eternity, a faint voice called out over an intercom.  “199,939 ,” it buzzed out. Shit. I thought. At #200343, I’d likely be stuck in this holding pattern for the next several days . I started to wonder if I could hold onto my number and just come back another day, but when I considered the alternative of missing my appointment and not knowing my credit rating, while these other people found out just by sitting around and waiting, I decided to stay.  I watched as 199,939 (an elderly man in a bowler hat) slowly made his way through the doors at the front of the room. The door made a thunderous bang when it closed. The black woman next to me shook her head slightly. I checked the time: It was nearly 2:00 AM. “How long have you been waiting?” I asked her. “Damned if I know…” she said, “I’m just trying to see if I can transfer some of my credit to my Grandmother– she passed away last year.” I nodded, thought about what she said, and had a small brain wave. Standing up, I approached the enclosed reception office.  “Can I help you?” She asked, with an intonation that bore the weight of a struggle I would likely never understand. Her voice was loud, and she wasn’t much of an improvement from the woman on the main floor. “Uh, yeah,” I said, trying to keep my voice down, partially out of politeness, and also in part out of the discomfort of being overheard by one of the other gladiators waiting behind me. “Are there, like, different number sets for different types of appointments?” “Huh?” she winged, “I’m sorry, sweetie, I can’t hear you.”  I repeated my question louder and within earshot of everyone.  “Are there different number sets for different types of appointments–  “No, listen, I’m sorry, honey,” she said– God, I hate it when they use terms of endearment , “There’s only one set of numbers. You’ll just have to wait your turn like everyone else, m’kay?”  She swirled her chair away, resumed her position and I shuffled back to my seat, averting my eyes from anyone that might be watching. This is not to say anyone actually watched, but I was sure the entire room heard and was now ridiculing my ignorance inside their heads. I resumed my seat next to the large black lady and the guy with the scar. They both ignored me.  God, what is so difficult about this ? I wondered. If there were thousands of agents and account managers, it shouldn’t be a problem to just check your credit and get a number. All these people had to do was go into the sub-basement and retrieve my file. Hell, they had pneumatic tubes. Wasn’t the point to have things running like clockwork? It occurred to me that the New York City office was probably just busier due to its prominence, and they probably have fewer agents on staff at night, but still, how hard was it to run to the sub-basement? The Sub-basement!  I suddenly remembered Arlington Hough saying that the files were kept in the basement. I could just go down and find my file single-handedly. I was a lawyer, and I knew how to read both business and  legal jargon; the file probably wasn’t too hard to interpret. Anyway, it was an account file—it all just came down to numbers. Not only that, but I was already dressed in a suit. Anyone who worked here and saw me would probably think I worked here, too. I could just go down, peek at my file, get an idea of what kind of credits I have, see if I could find a trend, and then book it out of here. It would be simple and painless.  I walked through the plan a few times in my head before standing back up, and a few additional benefits started to take form. If there weren’t too many people around when I went down there, I might even be able to take a picture of my file with my phone and create a duplicate. After some independent research on the different afterlives, I could identify one I really liked, hit up their  office, and maybe get my file in front of some key players. There were a number of ifs and thens about it, but it was a matter of life, death and an eternity. If this was my best opportunity to reserve a spot in a good afterlife without having to dick around with corporate bureaucracy, I had to take it. I glanced around the room to see if anyone was watching me, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it had actually worked out that I got into it with the lady at the reception desk. Now when people saw me leaving, they would just think I was cracking under the pressure of the waiting room. I leaned into it. I stood up and briskly walked to the elevator, and made a point to tap the up button impatiently and heave a loud sigh before the doors opened up. I laughed to myself once the doors were shut behind me. Idiots.  Little did they all know that I had the leg up on them now.  I let the elevator take me up to the -1st floor, which was thankfully dark and empty. Once the doors shut again, I descended toward level Sub . As an additional stroke of luck, no one else got on the elevator on my way down, a fact which I attributed to the late hour. The agents were probably out collecting lives right now (In New York, definitely). I was lost in this thought when the elevator doors parted, and the enormity of my task came into focus. The sub-basement was endlessly more massive than the waiting room. The filing cabinets themselves were ten drawers high, with ladders on a runner system so the top ones could be reached. Row upon row of cabinets to both my left and right went on further than I could see, and the columns of filing cabinets seemed to extend into an equal distance. I felt like I’d slipped into Bertrand Russell’s daydream.  I looked to my immediate right to find a thick set of binders chained to a lectern with a CRT monitor perched on top of it. The word directory was barely legible under a layer of dust. More disconcerting was the silence. I could hear the occasional click and turn of a page in the distance, but at no point did I see any people. Though this was to my benefit, it gave me a creeping sensation of someone lurking out of sight. I quickly lifted the heavy cover of the binder and sifted through the first few pages. After searching through a sea of various genus and species, I found that primates started at row 43, and humans began at Column 73. Shit… I thought, Arlington wasn’t kidding.   Life Ltd. really did service all these lives. I put this out of mind and started off in the direction of my file at a brisk but dignified walk, avoiding the look of someone in a rush, while still moving quickly. I rounded the corner of row 43, into the primate section. I continued walking, feeling myself begin to breathe harder. Wishing that I’d worked out more often, I pushed on. By the time I reached the Capuchin section, I had broken into a sweat. The sheer length of each column of filing cabinets boggled my mind and I felt the kind of agoraphobia one might associate with being out in the middle of the ocean. I wished they’d installed some kind of rail system or provided a golf cart I could drive around in. It would certainly have saved a lot of trouble. I rewarded myself with a rest by the time I reached the Human section.  Leaning against a filing cabinet, I looked at the first drawer of the section. It was labeled Aaronsen –Aaronson .  Shit, this was going to take a while, too.  Gathering my strength, I pressed on, keeping my eyes on the names of the filing cabinets. Every now and then, I continued to hear faint sounds in the distance, as someone moved between adjacent filing cabinets. Each time I slowed my pace to see if this was someone keeping track of me, and each time their steps faded away, lost in whatever personal task they were busying themselves with. After yet another small eternity, I reached a drawer that had my last name on it. I slid a ladder over to my file, ascended, and pulled the drawer open. It was heavy and screeched open as though it hadn’t been touched in ages. I started sifting through all the files that bore my last name, and was surprised to see how often it came up. A few were family members, but most I’d never heard of. After going through several folders, I suddenly reached a new and different surname. I paged backward. The same thing: I wasn’t in this folder.  Was I in the wrong place? I wondered.  I thought back to what Arlington said, and just about fell off the ladder. “At the end of a life, whenever that time comes, we close down your life account, and a record of it is stored in a filing cabinet in the sub-basement to be used for reference if need be.”   Dammit! These were only records of the deceased!  I realized. No wonder it took me so long to get out here . I had walked through the files of every deceased primate serviced by this office since the beginning of primates. I closed the drawer in frustration and began the long haul back to the elevator. I wondered if I had it in me to endure the waiting room again, or if it would be better to just come back another day when I had more energy. I walked slowly through the empty rows of filing cabinets, considering my options. Upon reaching the elevator, however, I noticed two managerial types blocking my exit. They dressed in dark suits and looked angrier than Arlington. One of them was somewhat plump with muttonchops, and the other had the look of a long, dark undertaker.  “And just what do you think you’re doing here, sir?” said the Plump One. My mind raced. I had been cooking up some excuse in the back of my head in the event of such an occasion, but now the occasion had actually arrived, my mind raced to catch up to my mouth.  “…Oh I um…”  “You do know that insider trading is an illegal offense punishable by up to ten years in prison,” said the Undertaker, “as well as a substantial forfeiture of credits?”  Shit! Shit! Shit! My mind was reeling. “No-no, I’m not– I wasn’t,” I began, “I was just here to meet my agent and I got lost—“ “You accidentally skipped all -47 floors, made it to the sub-basement, and then wandered beyond the rather blatant Employees Only  sign?” Undertaker said to me. I actually had  missed the employees only  sign, but that was because I was in a rush to see my file.  “I wasn’t here to steal anything!” I said, “I just thought if I could see my file–” “You can’t see anyone’s files,” said Plump, “It’s a breach of our client’s privacy.” “It is?” “Not without strict authorization,” Undertaker responded in agreement with Plump, "Sifting through that kind of unredacted information is—well, it’s just unethical.”  I tried to think of something I could tell them that would make them understand. After all, I was just a normal guy trying to ensure that I had enough credit to get into the best afterlife for myself. They couldn’t blame me for that.  “Look, I’m just trying to ensure I get into a good afterlife, okay?” I said, “That’s the whole reason I came to your office. People are dying every day and I’ve worked way too hard to lose out on a good place in an afterlife!” “The afterlife you choose is a decision that is solely up to you, sir,” said Plump, “Life Ltd. agents can offer credit growth plans and recommendations to afterlives, but we make no guarantees on either. This is all part of the standard liability clause in the terms of service agreement appended to your birth certificate.” I looked at both of them as sweat beaded around my temples. Neither of their faces betrayed an underlying emotion. They were here to do a job. I felt two hands gently press against the small of my back, and the two guided me to the opening doors of the elevator.  “Listen, I’m willing to cooperate with you guys to end this all as quickly and painlessly as possible.” I began, trying to weave an escape out of thin air, “I am a rather successful lawyer…” The doors closed, and they said nothing. We began our ascent in silence.  “I'm just saying,” I continued, “Rules are what I do for a living. There has to be something I can do to make this right— without taking too much of a credit hit.” “Well, your credit will ‘take a hit’ whether you like it or not. ‘Rules,’ as you say,” Undertaker replied, “As for your afterlife options, it depends. Are you married or engaged?” “Why?” “While Life Ltd. cannot guarantee your place in an afterlife, for an additional fee, most afterlives do offer union or dependency clauses that allow a spouse to piggyback on their partner’s afterlife policy so they can occupy eternity together.” “Assuming eternity with your spouse is something that appeals to you…” Plump chided.   Versus an eternity in the section 8 circles of Hell? It absolutely appealed to me. Sure, my girlfriend and I were in a spot of trouble. Our work schedules had carved a distance between us, and that was to say nothing of her likely affair with Barri, but it had also not been so long before that we entertained the possibility of marriage. I had no particular feelings on it either way at the time, but hearing the two security guards on the elevator reminded me that marriage was more than a social custom. It was also a legal status, so revered and cherished over time, that it had been baked into how our society measured an individual. So much of our reputation, status and character rested on our ability to find someone we could love enough to spend the rest of our time with. Min and I were strong. Surely we could find our way back to each other and build an eternity together? The elevator dinged as we reached the ground floor, and my captors led me out to the hall and into a drab holding room with a single chair and a table with a phone on it. The moment they exited to fill out some paperwork, I made my move. I reached into my pocket to retrieve my phone when a burst of vibrations signaled a barrage of text messages I’d apparently been too deep underground to receive over the last hour. 6 unread texts. All from Min. Sorry. I fell asleep. What’s going on? Are you still out? Ffs where are you? Ugh. Can you call me when you get this? What the fuck? So you’re just ignoring me now? This is unbelievable. Fuck you. Whatever. I’m done. I didn’t want to break up with you by text, but here we are.  I read through each message at least twice. It certainly complicated the phone call I’d had mapped out in my head, but there was no other way around it. I needed her. With a deep breath, I thumbed my way down to her name and dialed. I had no idea what I was going to say, or how she would respond, but my afterlife depended on it. There was no reason that we couldn’t still behave like adults. The phone rang once, and after what felt like a long pause, a second ring issued from the microphone. Another pause followed this by which point, sweat had collected around my collar. The third ring came and went. I felt my heart sink into my stomach, but held out a flicker of hope. Surely, she would pick up soon. Karl Nykwest spends his time co-running a small film and video production studio by day, and writing by night; usually something in the neighborhood of low fantasy, magical realism, or speculative weird lit. When his face is not buried in a screen, he’s usually enjoying cooking, or being outdoors.

The first house that she cleans they sit on the couch and scan her. She's always hated that. They've hired her but clearly distrust strangers. She wonders if they are high, or enjoy this weird voyeuristic service. She's not that girl but she has the numbers for that kind of thing. She wonders if they are happy. Or if they think she'll take something. It makes her want to take something. When she has a house she'll clean it herself. The second house belongs to a solitary man. He's simple despite his turtlenecks. He asks only that she always dust a few things. Mainly his writing achievements, old scrabble trophies. A picture of his mom that he has centered above his study. He usually doesn't stay and when he leaves the house he makes sure to mention the restaurant he's going to. He has money and pays well. Smiles often. This is a good house. The third house is more of a penthouse. She can see her city. See the four blocks where she grew up. The preschool where she met her first friend. They used to arrange Alphagettis into attempted words or played doctor and nurse. She saw that friend recently, bagging her eggs and oat milk at the local grocer. He still smiles with his eyes, still looks trustworthy, and kind. A few blocks past the preschool is the elementary she attended. She remembers playing red ass, the pinch and then sting of the bright tennis ball on the soft of her bum. She can still feel it now. She has three things she can always recall from around that age, from grade five to seven. The third is a happy memory. Her mother was excited to see her off. It was her first sugar shack and coming from the intense scorch of Trinidadian summers, she was fascinated by how the maple syrup hardened on the snow. She had seen a violin played before but not like this. Not with all the jumping up and down, the hips swaying from side to side. She looked around and saw other kids who were different, like her. She remembered the golden brown's sweet taste, like sugarcane, but also different. It was the first time she was not anxious. The first time she thought that maybe she could belong here. The second memory still burns. Still makes her stomach turn. The boys had chased her into a corner at recess. They teased and pulled at her hair, bounced her off the fence a few times. She had made the mistake of telling Jess she thought of the blonde boy sometimes, not realizing that sometimes Jess did too. Jess shared this publicly and the humiliation began. As her back hit the fence the fourth time she slumped to the ground. Through the slits of her wet hands she could see Jess looking from across the court, not running to tell, or running to help. She had not known cruelty until then. It was that same year but winter. The game was simple. Get on top of the hill. Hold your ground. Then you shall be crowned King of the hill. Queen in her case. She was on fire. Killing it. She had hit a growth spurt and had some size on the other kids. Even bigger than a few of the boys. She had the stretch marks to show for it. But no boy, let alone her mother, would see those for a few years later. After twenty minutes of pushing and tripping and stumbling around, fighting to hold position, she was exhausted. Jess saw this as an opportunity and clocked that she could attack from her blind spot. Knew she could catch her off guard, push her to the ground and take the crown. But it didn't quite go like that. She pretended not to see Jess coming and at the last second she dodged the assault and countered by sticking her leg out, tripping Jess from the top of the hill. She stood over Jess and watched as she cried, gripping her twisted arm. She thought of the day she told her about the crush, how scared she was, how she needed to tell someone. How she didn't understand what she was feeling deep in her stomach. She looked at Jess and felt the wire of the fence in her back again, the humiliation. She got closer, and filled her hands with snow. “Say sorry Jess, you never said sorry.”                                                                                           “No….You bitch.” All that collected snow started to melt and her hands were wet again. She must’ve shot Jess with such a nasty look because Jess got scared, tried to pull away. She grabbed more snow, started dumping it on Jess’s face, throwing it even. Giving Jess a chance to apologize never tamed the guilt or stopped her stomach from turning upside down whenever she thinks of it. She got suspended that day, Jess didn’t. She had never been cruel until then.   ​The last memory is a funny one. She still doesn’t know what to think of it. One of the boys that bullied her asked her to the school dance with a note that read. “I don’t care that you’re different, can we go together?” Not so romantic, but she had never been asked before. ​That night when the chaperones weren’t looking he pulled her in close, she had never been held like that, not with tenderness, not from a boy. He took his shot aimed for her mouth but caught her tooth. Chipped it a little. This is how she remembers her first kiss. When she’s done cleaning the penthouse she busses home. She's greeted by her cat rubbing up against her leg. She grabs a pint of ice cream out of the freezer and slumps down on the couch. She notices a stain on the cushion. She rubs at it. Nothing. She tries again. No luck. She thinks about grabbing a rag, but quickly abandons the idea. Sacha Bissonnette is a reader for Wigleaf TOP 50. His fiction has appeared in Witness, The Baltimore Review, Wigleaf, SmokeLong, ARC poetry, EQMM, Terrain, Ghost Parachute, The No Sleep Podcast and elsewhere. He is currently working on a short fiction collection as well as a comic book adaptation of one of his short stories. His projects are powered by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the City of Ottawa. He has been nominated for several awards including the pushcart prize twice and BSF thrice. He has been selected for the Wigleaf top 50 2023, 2024 and for the 2024 Sundress Publications Residency and is the winner of the 2024 Faulkner Gulf Coast Residency. Find him on X @sjohnb9 or at his website sachajohnbissonnette.com

The great horned owl is depressed. Those dark feathers over his amber eyes may give him an aura of stern anger, but I know his double- whoos  are thick with sadness. Sitting high on an abandoned limb, blending into the grays and browns of the leafless trees that sway together beyond my backyard, he calls out every night. I can hear him as I'm settling into my own warm bed, alone save for the quiet dog at my feet. Whoo-whoo , he cries, as the moon rises full and happy.  The owl aches to be understood. He longs for a friend to share his meaty meals and the twiggy nest he padded with pine straw for comfort. A downy ear to hear his thoughts. Another being who knows what it's like to feel so solitary in a sky full of air.  The owl used to keep tentative company with a gray mouse. Its pink nose twitched with anxiety whenever the owl pressed the side of his feathery face against it, listening to its heartbeat and sighing silently. The mouse misunderstood, and skittered away to hide beneath a rotted log.  For a while, another great horned owl in the woods had occasionally responded to his pleas. Those nights I held my breath in the dark and listened for the reassuring, throaty voice that let my owl know he didn’t suffer alone. I hear you, but I don’t want to be near you , it said, but gave no explanation for its distance. Before long, the replies fell silent, and now his mournful appeals go unanswered.  His melancholy vibrates deep in my bones. I am well-worn with sitting alone in the dark, hearing far-off trains wail, silently soothing others but not yourself. I understand his emptiness. Last night, the owl shook me awake at moon o'clock, his hoots so sorrowful I thought one of my children had awoken from a bad dream and needed the comfort of my embrace. I rose and listened, and heard only contented breathing in still rooms. No one soothes the owl’s sobs. No one comes to ease whatever loss he grieves. His heavy and heartsick whoo-whoos  ring out in the cold woods, night after night.  Next to my house, in a small Japanese maple tree forsaken of leaves, a lonely robin sits – wishing she were an owl.   Megan Hanlon is a podcast producer who sometimes writes. Her words have appeared in The Forge, Gordon Square Review, Reckon Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Variant Literature, Cowboy Jamboree, and more. Her blog, Sugar Pig, is equal parts tragedy and comedy. She hopes the owl in her backyard returns this winter.

Some Art makes me want to quit.  Poetry gives me a choice  of sooner or later. I believe  sooner to be better if for no  other reason than I forget  stuff like that one time  I plum forgot to sleep— O man was it great. So fucking great. Separation of Powers Change may be constant  but I believe some things should stay the same like the separation of church                           and state. Scripture says                            God watches over us for  signs of sin. That may be true but he doesn’t know                             what Heisenberg knows:                watching is a two-way  street. Seeing follows                               the fall. Absent a net  the wide-angle shot  legitimizes the split. Marc Meierkort is the author of the chapbook Break in Case of Glass  (Bottlecap Press). He is Managing Editor for Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose .  A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, his work has appeared in BlazeVOX Journal, Roi Faineant , and The Argyle Literary Magazine , among others. He teaches at Columbia College Chicago.